Who are Databricks's decision-makers?

Databricks is run by its founders. Ali Ghodsi, a UC Berkeley adjunct professor, has been CEO since 2016 (taking over from founding CEO Ion Stoica, now Executive Chairman). Matei Zaharia — who created Apache Spark for his Berkeley PhD and later MLflow — is co-founder and CTO, with Reynold Xin as Chief Architect and Patrick Wendell as VP of Engineering.

The group came out of UC Berkeley's AMPLab, where the seven founders contributed to Apache Spark before commercializing it in 2013. That academic-to-product lineage still shapes the company: Databricks both stewards open-source projects (Spark, Delta Lake, MLflow, Unity Catalog) and sells the commercial platform built on them. Around the founders, a non-founder bench has been built for scale — CFO Dave Conte (ex-Splunk), CRO Ron Gabrisko, and a marketing organization under CMO Rick Schultz.

Strategy and product direction run through the founders — Ghodsi (CEO) and Zaharia/Xin (technical) set the platform agenda, while CFO Dave Conte (the former Splunk CFO who took that company public and scaled it past $2B in revenue) owns financial discipline and major spend approval. CRO Ron Gabrisko owns the revenue org and field operations.

For a vendor, the budget owner depends on the category: engineering and infrastructure tooling routes through VP/Eng leadership under Wendell; data, AI, and security tooling touches the technical founders and platform leads; and GTM, sales-tech, or marketing tools route through the revenue (Gabrisko) and marketing (Schultz) organizations. Expect a buying committee — a technical champion plus a finance/procurement gate under Conte — rather than a single decision-maker on anything material, especially with the company in IPO-readiness mode.

With an estimated 12,000–15,000 employees across 30+ offices, Databricks is structured around its product platform (engineering and product under the technical founders) and a global field organization (sales, solutions engineering, and customer success under the CRO). Finance under CFO Dave Conte has been built out for public-market readiness, with the company describing itself as 'IPO-ready' on board, audit, and reporting structures.

The org has expanded heavily through acquisition — Redash, MosaicML, Tabular, and Neon fold engineering teams into the platform — so newer AI and database groups (Mosaic AI, Lakebase) carry leadership and roadmaps inherited from those deals. That makes the AI and database divisions fast-moving, well-funded centers of new tooling decisions.