APerson

Ali Ghodsi

Co-founder and CEO of Databricks; adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.

• Ali Ghodsi is an Iranian-Swedish-American computer scientist who works on distributed systems and data management.
• At UC Berkeley he helped start the Apache Mesos and Apache Spark projects.
• In 2013 he co-founded Databricks, a cloud data analytics company that commercializes Spark, and became its chief executive in 2016.

Key facts

Born

19781

Education

MSc in computer engineering and MBA, Mid-Sweden University (2002); PhD in distributed computing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology (2006), advised by Seif Haridi1

Before Berkeley

Co-founder of Peerialism AB, a Stockholm peer-to-peer data transfer company; assistant professor at KTH from 2008 to 20091

UC Berkeley

Joined in 2009 as a visiting scholar, working with Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Michael Franklin and Matei Zaharia; helped start Apache Mesos and Apache Spark; co-invented dominant resource fairness1

Teaching

Co-taught Big Data System Research (CS294-15) with Ion Stoica in fall 2015 and Advanced Topics in Computer Systems (CS262A) in spring 20182

Papers

Co-author of Spark SQL (SIGMOD 2015), Apache Spark: A Unified Engine for Big Data Processing (CACM 2016) and Accelerating the Machine Learning Lifecycle with MLflow (2018)2

Databricks

Co-founded it in 2013; started as president of engineering and became CEO in 20161

Databricks funding

In August 2026 he led Databricks through a $5 billion round, led by Coatue Management, at a $190 billion valuation1

Recognition

Named to the TIME100 most influential people in AI (2026)1

31 Oct 2026Last checked against its sources today

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