Date started current role: July 2013 Location: Palo Alto, California Matei Zaharia is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Chief Technologist at Databricks. He started the Apache Spark project during his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009, and has worked broadly in datacenter systems, co-starting the Apache Mesos project and contributing as a committer on Apache Hadoop. Today, Zaharia tech-leads the MLflow development effort at Databricks in addition to other aspects of the platform. Zaharia’s research work was recognised through the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for the best PhD dissertation in computer science, an NSF CAREER Award, and the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).