Zaharia graduated from secondary school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute before moving to become an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo.[6]
Zaharia was a gold medalist at the International Collegiate Programming Contest, where his team University of Waterloo placed fourth in the world and first in North America in 2005.[7] During his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo, he also greatly contributed to water rendering physics in the now open-source game called 0 A.D.[8] He also helped mod the Age of Mythology scenario called Norse Wars, which was re-adapted into the Age of Empires III scenario called Fort Wars. [9]
While at University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab in 2009, he created Apache Spark as a faster alternative to MapReduce.[10] He received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD research on large-scale computing.[11]