Please join us in welcoming Hernan Alvarez to the Great Expectations team!
As the new VP of Product, Hernan brings a constellation of skills and experience to Great Expectations, and we couldn’t be more excited to have him on board. His deep background in large-scale data products and infrastructure will be an invaluable asset as he leads our product team.
Most recently, Hernan has been deeply immersed in machine learning and MLOps as VP of product development at DataRobot and Algorithmia. During these experiences, he found that the real barrier to successful ML isn’t the machine learning itself but the lack of high-quality, trustworthy data to train the models and get predictions with.
“The through line [of my experience] has been this consistent experience with large-scale data sets, early machine learning, and operational problems,” Hernan said. “Culminating to this point where I’m like: Okay, I’ve been in MLOps for four or five years. That’s actually not where people are struggling.”
Instead, Hernan saw people who have the tools to succeed being stymied at a point well before they even get to use those tools:
"There’s this ongoing problem with quality and trust, right in the data… I want to get around that very, very basic [roadblock] to actually help people go and realize the dream."
Hernan sees Great Expectations as the right company for him to tackle these problems with for two reasons: our commitment to a healthy open source community and an amazing culture.
“First of all, I really enjoyed meeting with and working with the team,” he said. “I spent a lot of time with Abe [Gong] and James [Campbell], and they had great chemistry and working relationships… And number two was: what’s the validation, is this thing real? And the validation came in the open-source community.
“There’s such a rich and growing community there of users who are saying: Yes, these are real problems, and yes, this is a product that solves those problems. It was really exciting to me.”
At Great Expectations, we’re creating a shared open standard for data quality. Using GX, data engineers and domain experts can work together to express and enforce joint quality standards, effectively creating data contracts. Our commitment to open source and to transparent operations sets us apart from competitors who obfuscate the workings of their technology.
Prior to joining GX, Hernan led product development at multiple companies in large-scale data and AI. He’s also helmed teams that built with and contributed to open source projects such as OpenStack, most notably at Blue Box Group/IBM.
He lives in the greater Seattle area with his family, and can often be found outdoors camping, fishing, biking, and generally embodying the Pacific Northwest stereotype. Hernan and family are avid cooks and foodies who enjoy hosting large gatherings and feeding their family and friends.
