Matei Zaharia (born 1984 or 1985[1]) is a Romanian-Canadian computer scientist, educator and the creator of Apache Spark.
[2][3][4] As of April 2022, Forbes ranked him and Ion Stoica as the 3rd-richest people in Romania with a net worth of $1.6 billion.
[5] Zaharia graduated from secondary school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute before moving to become an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo.
[6] Zaharia was a gold medalist at the International Collegiate Programming Contest, where his team University of Waterloo placed fourth in the world and first in North America in 2005.
[9] While at University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to MapReduce.