2013 – 2026 · Cloud infrastructure · Private (no SEC filings)
Databricks Leadership
Who founded Databricks (a cohort of seven from the UC Berkeley AMPLab and the Apache Spark project), who runs it today, and how the company is governed. Co-founder Ali Ghodsi has been CEO since January 2016, succeeding co-founder Ion Stoica, who remains Executive Chair of the board. Six of the seven co-founders are still in named executive or chair roles more than a decade after founding — an unusually durable founder-cohort continuity. Databricks is privately held, headquartered in San Francisco, and does not file with SEC EDGAR; the page is sourced from databricks.com/company/leadership-team, /founders, /board-of-directors, the company newsroom, and contemporaneous reporting on the funding arc.
Roster row: Databricks on /orgs/.
The seven AMPLab co-founders — 2013
Databricks was incorporated in 2013 by a cohort from the AMPLab at UC Berkeley, where the team had created Apache Spark. The founders later originated three more flagship open-source projects from inside the company — Delta Lake, MLflow, and Unity Catalog — all foundational to what Databricks now calls the lakehouse Data Intelligence Platform. The founder-cohort continuity is unusually durable: six of the seven hold named executive or board-chair roles at the company today, more than a decade after founding.
Co-founder. Became CEO in January 2016, succeeding co-founder Ion Stoica. Holds a PhD in distributed computing from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and is an Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley. The most-prominent company-side public voice through earnings-like investor updates, keynotes at the annual Data + AI Summit, and the press coverage around each successive funding round.
Co-founder. Served as the company's first CEO from incorporation in 2013 through January 2016, then handed the role to Ghodsi and became Executive Chair. Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley; ran the AMPLab and its successor RISELab, the academic incubators for Spark, Mesos, and Ray. Also co-founded Conviva (video streaming) and, more recently, Anyscale (the Ray-stewarding AI infrastructure company).
Co-founder. The original creator of Apache Spark, written during his PhD at the UC Berkeley AMPLab. Co-creator of Delta Lake and MLflow. Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley (previously Stanford); his academic publications are the most-cited piece of the company's open-source research lineage.
Co-founder. Long-running release manager for Apache Spark, the role that gates every Spark version's open-source ship. PhD work at the UC Berkeley AMPLab on Spark internals; one of the core authors of the original Spark codebase. Continues to lead Databricks' core platform engineering organization.
Co-founder. One of the most-prolific committers to Apache Spark by commit count across the project's history, and a primary architect of Spark SQL and the DataFrame API. PhD work at the UC Berkeley AMPLab. Leads architectural direction across the Data Intelligence Platform.
Co-founder. Co-creator of Apache Mesos (the cluster manager that Spark originally ran on) and a co-author of the foundational Spark papers, all from the UC Berkeley AMPLab. Listed on the company founders page without a current operating title, indicating he is no longer in an active executive seat though he remains publicly recognized as a co-founder. Treat the absence of a title as Databricks' own framing rather than a position statement on his current involvement.
Co-founder. The only co-founder whose role is on the customer-facing side rather than the platform-engineering or open-source side. Leads Field Engineering — the pre-sales, solutions-architecture, and customer-implementation organization that walks the company's largest customers from pilot to production. The structural counterweight on the customer-success side to the heavy engineering / research orientation of the rest of the founder cohort.
Founder titles are exactly as published on databricks.com/company/founders at the time of the most recent refresh of this page. Databricks does not publish bios for each co-founder on its own pages; the contextual detail above is drawn from the founders' public academic affiliations, their open-source-project authorship, and contemporaneous coverage of Databricks' founding.
Current executive team
The full executive roster published on databricks.com/company/leadership-team. Databricks is private and not subject to SEC Section 16 disclosure, so this is the only authoritative officer roster — there is no DEF 14A or 10-K cross-check. The CEO and the two co-founder-officers (Tavakoli-Shiraji on field engineering; the other three co-founder execs sit in the founder row above with their CTO / Chief Architect / VP Engineering titles repeated as needed). Click any row for context where it adds value beyond the title.
Ali Ghodsi
Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer
CEO since 2016
Co-founder. The CEO seat has been continuous under Ghodsi for the better part of a decade — the durability is itself a structural fact about the company. See the Founders section for the AMPLab / KTH background.
Andy Kofoid
President, Global Field Operations
—
Heads global field operations (sales, customer success, partner ecosystem). The "President, Global Field Operations" title sits structurally above the Chief Revenue Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer in the company's published roster.
David Conte
Chief Financial Officer
—
The CFO seat. The CFO is the load-bearing role at a late-stage private company on an IPO track; Databricks' Series L disclosure in December 2025 emphasized positive trailing-12-month free cash flow alongside the >$4.8B revenue run-rate, the kind of financial profile that typically precedes a registration statement.
Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji
Co-founder & SVP of Field Engineering
Since founding
The customer-facing co-founder. See the Founders section for context.
Ron Gabrisko
Chief Revenue Officer
—
Owns the global revenue organization — new business, expansion within named accounts, the segmentation across enterprise / commercial / public-sector. Reports into the President of Global Field Operations.
Hatim Shafique
Chief Operating Officer
—
The COO seat. Owns the cross-functional operations layer: business operations, planning, the rhythm of the business.
Rick Schultz
Chief Marketing Officer
—
Heads marketing. The CMO role at a platform company at Databricks' scale concentrates around enterprise demand generation, analyst relations, and the annual Data + AI Summit — the company's flagship customer event.
Amy Reichanadter
Chief People Officer
—
Owns people operations — recruiting, compensation, equity programs, performance management — across what Databricks describes as a global workforce serving more than 20,000 customer organizations.
Trâm Phi
SVP & General Counsel
—
The top legal officer. At Databricks' stage the General Counsel role spans corporate (rounds, M&A like the 2023 MosaicML acquisition), commercial (enterprise contracts and partner-cloud arrangements with AWS / Azure / GCP), regulatory, and IP across the company's open-source projects.
Fermín Serna
Chief Security Officer
—
The top security officer — owns platform security, customer-data isolation across cloud tenants, and the company's posture against the regulated-industry compliance regimes (FedRAMP, HIPAA, financial-services attestations).
Naveen Zutshi
Chief Information Officer
—
Heads internal IT and corporate engineering — the systems Databricks itself runs on to serve its customers and operate as a global company.
Vinod Marur
SVP of Engineering
—
One of the senior engineering leaders, sitting alongside co-founder Patrick Wendell on the platform engineering side. The engineering org at Databricks is large enough to support multiple SVP-level reports rather than a single CTO-plus-VPE shape.
David Meyer
SVP of Products
—
One of two SVPs of Products. Databricks' product surface is broad enough to span data warehousing, governance, AI / ML, business intelligence, agentic engineering (Genie Code, launched March 11, 2026), and the operational Postgres-style database Lakebase (launched June 11, 2025), with the product portfolio split across more than one senior leader.
Adam Conway
SVP of Products
—
The second SVP of Products. The two-SVPs-of-Products shape lets Databricks scale the product organization across the platform's distinct surfaces; the precise portfolio split between Meyer and Conway is not formally disclosed.
The "Note" column is intentionally sparse where the title is fully self-describing; click any row for the brief context. Specific tenure dates ("at Databricks since") are not disclosed on the company's leadership page for non-founder officers and are therefore not surfaced as a separate column. Departure or hire announcements may appear in the company newsroom; the recurring refresh task watches that feed.
Board of directors
The full board as published on databricks.com/company/board-of-directors. Unlike Cognition or some other late-stage private companies, Databricks publishes a complete director roster, so the rows below are asserted rather than inferred from funding-round leadership. The seats split roughly into three groups: founder seats (Stoica as Executive Chair, Ghodsi as CEO, Zaharia as CTO), named-investor seats (Andreessen Horowitz and New Enterprise Associates — both early Databricks investors), and independent seats (Donio, Chadwick, and the academic seat held by Shenker). Click any row for context.
Ion Stoica
Co-founder; Executive Chair; former CEO 2013–2016
Founder
Chairs the board. The CEO-to-Executive-Chair transition in January 2016 is the company's single most durable governance fact: a founder hands the CEO role to another founder, then stays on as Executive Chair for a decade-plus. See the Founders section for the AMPLab / RISELab / Anyscale context.
Ali Ghodsi
Co-founder & CEO
Founder-CEO
Standard founder-CEO board seat. See the CEO officer row for context.
Matei Zaharia
Co-founder & CTO; original Apache Spark creator
Founder
The third founder on the board, alongside Stoica and Ghodsi. See the Founders section for the Spark / Delta / MLflow context.
Ben Horowitz
Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
Investor
The named Andreessen Horowitz seat. a16z has been a recurring Databricks investor across multiple rounds, including the December 2025 Series L at the $134B valuation. Horowitz is among the most prominent venture investors of the era and the a16z co-founder; his presence on the board has been continuous through a long stretch of the company's funding arc.
Pete Sonsini
General Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
Investor
The named NEA seat. NEA has been one of Databricks' longest-running institutional investors; Sonsini is the NEA General Partner most closely associated with the firm's enterprise-software / data-infrastructure investments.
Elena Donio
Independent director; veteran enterprise-software CEO and operating executive
Independent
An independent director. The board page lists her without a firm affiliation, signaling the seat is not tied to a particular venture investor or operating company — the typical shape of the late-stage-private "independent" seat that becomes a public-company Audit Committee chair candidate if Databricks files a registration statement. Treat the “veteran operating executive” framing as descriptive rather than asserting a specific current role; Databricks does not publish bios for individual directors on the board page.
Jonathan Chadwick
Independent director; former CFO at multiple public enterprise-software companies
Independent
A second independent director. Chadwick is well-known in the public-enterprise-software CFO bench; his presence on the Databricks board is consistent with the company's IPO-track shape (independent-director composition is the typical pre-S-1 board-construction step). Databricks does not publish a per-director bio on the board page; the “former public-company CFO” framing reflects his widely-reported career history rather than a Databricks-side disclosure.
Scott Shenker
Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley
Academic
The academic seat. Shenker is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the network-systems and distributed-systems fields, with a long affiliation with the UC Berkeley CS faculty that produced the AMPLab cohort. The academic seat is a structurally unusual feature for a late-stage commercial enterprise-software company; it functions as a tether back to the research-community origins of Spark and the lakehouse architecture.
The eight rows above are exactly the directors Databricks lists on its board page at the time of the most recent refresh of this page. Three of the seven AMPLab co-founders hold board seats (Stoica, Ghodsi, Zaharia); the other four (Wendell, Xin, Konwinski, Tavakoli-Shiraji) do not appear on the board roster. Independent-director and academic-seat framings (Donio, Chadwick, Shenker) reflect each director's widely-reported career history rather than Databricks-side per-director bio disclosure — the board page lists only name and one-line affiliation. The page does not attempt to assign specific Audit / Compensation / Nominating committee seats because Databricks does not publish committee composition.
Capital structure and the funding arc
Databricks is a Delaware C-corporation. As a private company that has not filed a public registration statement, Databricks does not publish its certificate of incorporation, and the precise share counts and per-class rights are not in the public record. What is publicly knowable through funding-round announcements:
The cap table follows the standard late-stage-private structure: Common stock held by founders and employees, plus a long series of preferred-stock issuances spanning more than a decade. The most recent disclosed round is the Series L, announced December 16, 2025 at a $134 billion post-money valuation, with more than $4 billion of new equity raised in the round, led by Insight Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Andreessen Horowitz, BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, GIC, MGX, NEA, T. Rowe Price, Temasek, and Thrive Capital are among the other participants. In the same disclosure the company reported surpassing a $4.8 billion revenue run-rate growing more than 55% year over year, with positive free cash flow over the trailing twelve months — the financial profile a late-stage company typically establishes before filing a registration statement.
Standard preferred-stock rights at each round typically include: 1x non-participating liquidation preference; pro-rata rights to participate in future rounds; information rights; protective provisions (consent required for sale of the company, issuance of senior preferred, changes to certificate of incorporation); and standard anti-dilution protection. One-vote-per-share is standard for both Common and Preferred at private-company stage; super-voting structures of the kind used by Snowflake's class structure-at-IPO or Palantir's Class F are typically not introduced until immediately before an IPO. Databricks has not filed a registration statement, so no super-voting class has been disclosed.
Practical effect: founder voting power is a function of (a) the founders' aggregate Common holdings, post-dilution from twelve-plus preferred rounds, and (b) any voting agreements among the preferred holders. Neither figure is publicly disclosed. What is structurally implied: with a16z and NEA in board-seat positions through the entire arc and the founder cohort holding three of eight board seats plus the Executive Chair role, no single investor cohort dominates governance; the founders' Common, plus the protective provisions agreed across rounds, plus the unusually long CEO-and-Executive-Chair continuity, give the founder cohort meaningful but not absolute control over major corporate decisions. The page does not attempt percentage-of-voting-power figures because the underlying cap table is not public.
2023 MosaicML acquisition. The acquisition of MosaicML for a reported ~$1.3 billion in June 2023 brought in the Mosaic AI stack and a senior team that has since shaped Databricks' generative-AI product surface. MosaicML's founding executives (notably Naveen Rao and Hanlin Tang) are not currently listed on Databricks' executive-team page, indicating that whatever roles they took post-acquisition either did not rise to the published-officer level or have since concluded. The acquisition itself remains the company's most-cited structural M&A event.
Read these primary sources
Databricks is private and does not file with SEC EDGAR (no 10-K, no 10-Q, no DEF 14A, no Section 16 officer / director filings). The links below are the closest publicly-available primary-source equivalents — the company's own leadership / founders / board pages, the newsroom, and the academic publications that underpin the lakehouse architecture.
Databricks' own leadership pages — the executive team, founders, and board
The canonical company-side roster. Three pages, one each for the executive team, the founders, and the board of directors.
# Executive team — 14 named officers
https://www.databricks.com/company/leadership-team
# Founders — the seven AMPLab co-founders with current titles
https://www.databricks.com/company/founders
# Board of directors — eight named directors
https://www.databricks.com/company/board-of-directors
# About Databricks — company-side framing and the founding story
https://www.databricks.com/company/about-usDatabricks newsroom — funding rounds, product launches, leadership announcements
The press-release feed. New-officer announcements, funding rounds, and major product launches land here first.
# Newsroom landing
https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom
# All press releases
https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releasesThe Apache Spark / lakehouse research lineage
The academic foundation. The original Spark paper from Zaharia and the AMPLab, plus the more recent lakehouse and Delta Lake papers.
# Apache Spark — the open-source project Databricks was built around
https://spark.apache.org/
# Delta Lake — the storage layer for the lakehouse architecture
https://delta.io/
# MLflow — the machine-learning lifecycle project
https://mlflow.org/
# Unity Catalog — open-source data governance
https://www.unitycatalog.io/
# The original Spark "Resilient Distributed Datasets" paper (2012)
https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi12/technical-sessions/presentation/zaharia