Ali Ghodsi is a Swedish-Iranian computer scientist, academic, and technology executive. He is the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, one of the world's leading data and AI companies.
AMPLab and Apache Spark
Ghodsi earned his Ph.D. in Distributed Computing from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 2009, he joined UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar at the AMPLab. There, he co-developed **Apache Spark**, an open-source cluster-computing framework that became the industry standard for processing big data pipelines. He also co-developed Apache Mesos.
Databricks CEO
In 2013, Ghodsi co-founded Databricks alongside Matei Zaharia and other AMPLab researchers. Under his leadership as CEO (since 2016), Databricks spearheaded the **Lakehouse architecture**—merging data lakes and data warehouses—and built a multi-billion dollar platform that integrates data processing, analytics, and machine learning models under one system.
