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Patrick Wendell

Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, Databricks

Patrick Wendell is a co-founder of Databricks and its VP of Engineering; Databricks' Data + AI Summit 2026 speaker page says Wendell leads the company's AI efforts, including products such as Genie and Unity Gateway. Wendell is listed as a committer on the Apache Spark project's committers page, with Databricks as the organization. Wendell is also one of the bylined authors of Databricks' June 2024 post announcing the open-sourcing of Unity Catalog.123

At a glance

Current role
Co-Founder and VP of Engineering
Company
Databricks
Sector
Company
Education
UC Berkeley
Work listed
2
Sources cited
6
Profile reviewed

Career

Patrick Wendell completed an M.S. in computer science at UC Berkeley, where Wendell's research focused on optimizing large-scale analytics workloads. Wendell co-founded Databricks and serves as its VP of Engineering, and Databricks' Data + AI Summit speaker page says Wendell leads the company's AI efforts, including Genie, Unity Gateway and partnerships with model providers.1

Research and open-source work

At Berkeley, Wendell co-authored with Kay Ousterhout, Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica the 2013 technical report on Sparrow, a decentralized scheduler for highly parallel analytics jobs that complete in hundreds of milliseconds.4

Wendell is listed as an Apache Spark committer affiliated with Databricks, and the Spark committers page quotes Wendell's guidance on the trade-offs of backporting bug fixes to older releases. In June 2024 Wendell was one of the bylined authors of the Databricks post announcing that Unity Catalog, a catalog for data and AI governance, was being released as open source.2536

Work and contributions

  • Apache Spark Open-source code

    Listed as a committer on the Apache Spark committers page. The apache/spark repository is published under the Apache-2.0 license.25

  • Unity Catalog Open-source code

    One of five bylined authors of the June 2024 Databricks post announcing that Unity Catalog was being open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license and hosted at LF AI & Data. The repository is Apache-2.0.36

Timeline

  1. Co-authored the Sparrow technical report on scalable scheduling for sub-second parallel jobs.4
  2. Co-authored the Databricks announcement of open-sourcing Unity Catalog.3
  3. Listed as a speaker at Databricks' Data + AI Summit 2026 as Co-Founder and VP of Engineering.1

Where they work

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References

6 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. Patrick Wendell — Data + AI Summit 2026 speaker pageDatabricks · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. Committers | Apache SparkApache Spark (Apache Software Foundation) · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. Open sourcing Unity Catalog (Databricks blog)Databricks · Announcement · published Jun 13, 2024 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. Sparrow: Scalable Scheduling for Sub-Second Parallel Jobs (Technical Report UCB/EECS-2013-29)EECS, UC Berkeley · Paper · published Apr 10, 2013 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. apache/spark repository (Apache-2.0 license)Apache Software Foundation (GitHub repository) · Repository · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  6. unitycatalog/unitycatalog repository (Apache-2.0 license)Unity Catalog (GitHub repository) · Repository · accessed Oct 21, 2026