Moving data is easy.
Stopping bad data is the job.
Two people asking the same question should get the same number. Our data engineers build the tests, contracts and gates that make that true — and stay on the Virtus payroll while they sit in your team.
- $35–62
- per hour
- 7–12 days
- to day one
- 1 month
- minimum
Six nodes, six gates, and what happens when each one fails
Every pipeline diagram you have been shown has the boxes. Almost none of them have the third column — and the third column is the entire difference between a pipeline and a liability.
Source row count within 3σ of the trailing 30 days
Pipeline halts. Yesterday's data stays served. Nobody sees a half-loaded table.
Schema hash matches the contract
Quarantine the batch and page the owner. A renamed column is not silently mapped to null.
Referential integrity: every order has a customer
Orphans land in a rejects table with the reason, and the run continues without them.
Uniqueness on the grain, no unexpected nulls
Build fails before publish. The old model stays live — dashboards never show a duplicated total.
Reconciles to the finance close within 0.5%
Publish blocked and the variance report is sent to both owners. This is the gate that keeps the metric trusted.
Served data less than 90 minutes old
A staleness banner appears on the dashboard itself, so consumers know before they act.
A dashboard nobody trusts is worth nothing
The cost of a wrong number is not the wrong number — it is that every future number gets checked by hand. Gates are how trust is rebuilt.
Tests on data, not only on code
Your transformation code can be perfectly correct and still produce nonsense, because the source changed. Only data tests catch that.
Cost is a design constraint
Warehouse spend attributed per model and per consumer, with the ten most expensive queries named and owned.
Lineage that is generated
Column-level, from source system to the number on the slide, produced by the tooling rather than drawn in a diagram that goes stale.
Warehouse-agnostic
Three bands
Mid-level
3–5 yrs$35–43/hrBuilds and maintains models in an existing warehouse. Comfortable with dbt and SQL; still learning orchestration failure modes.
Senior
5–8 yrs$43–54/hrOwns a domain end to end — ingestion, model, tests, cost and the on-call for it.
Lead
8+ yrs$54–72/hrSets the platform, the contracts with source systems, and the semantic layer everyone else builds on.
Name the number two teams disagree about
That single disagreement tells us more about what you need than a stack list. It is usually where the first engagement starts.