Ali Ghodsi

Ali Ghodsi is the President, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, the Data and AI company. Under Ali’s leadership, Databricks has pioneered the Data Intelligence Platform built on a Lakehouse architecture to simplify and scale analytics and AI for thousands of global organizations. Ali’s experience as a data and AI leader spans more than 20 years, with deep roots in AI research and open source software. He was one of the creators of open source project, Apache Spark. Ideas from his academic research in the areas of resource management and scheduling and data caching have been applied to Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop. Before being named CEO in 2016, he served as the VP of Engineering and Product Management. Ali also sits on the Databricks Board of Directors. In addition to his role at Databricks, Ali continues to be involved in academia. He is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he focuses on research in the areas of computer systems and AI, and is on the board of UC Berkeley’s RiseLab. Originally from Iran and Sweden, Ali resides in Berkeley, CA with his family. Ali received his MBA from Mid-Sweden University in 2003 and PhD from KTH/Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 2006 in the area of Distributed Computing.