Great Expectations was created in 2017 as a side project between two longtime friends, Abe Gong (CEO) and James Campbell (CTO). Encountering many of the same pain points around data quality, they independently arrived at the same conclusion: data practitioners needed a better way to test and document their data.

At the time, Abe was leading Superconductive Health, a healthcare data consultancy, and James was a data scientist and researcher for the US federal government. They jumped at the chance to work together and started collaborating on Great Expectations as an open source project.

The platform was launched at the Strata Data & AI Conference in 2018, which kicked off a groundswell of support, buzz, and contributions. Data engineers, scientists, and analysts loved the flexibility, extensibility, and expressiveness of the platform. Nontechnical data stakeholders loved the way the data documentation enabled visibility and collaboration.

Within a few months, it was clear that momentum was building around data quality and that Great Expectations was at the forefront of the movement. In 2019, Abe and James pivoted to focus entirely on building Great Expectations as a product and a company.

We raised a first round of venture capital and began actively building the open source community around Great Expectations—which became one of the fastest-growing data communities in the world.

Today, the Great Expectations team is growing rapidly, backed by some of the best open source and data infrastructure investors in the industry. We’re pursuing a product-led, developer-first path to commercialization with our SaaS product, GX Cloud, which augments the GX OSS framework to build a holistic organizational solution for data quality. GX Cloud entered its public preview phase in February 2024.

We’re a people-first team, prioritizing individual professional development and providing unique career opportunities as the company scales.

Does this seem like a fit for you? Join the team!