Ryan Varley Email & Phone Number

Stockton-On-Tees, Gb

London, Gb

• Leadership of the Data, Engineering, Product and Content teams (direct management over the data team).• Setting data, engineering and AI strategy - improving both internal processes and innovating in our product that reaches 50 million learners.• Advising the board on the latest in AI and the opportunities and threats to the business.• Architecting the infrastructure for simplicity, ability to scale, and stability.• Implemented information security policies, product SLAs and data protection policies in response to business risk and new enterprise customer requirements.Key projects include:• Developed "Highlights": short, topic-focused video clips derived from existing content which greatly increased the usability of our catalogue.• Unique AI tutor-like chatbot that leverages Highlights to answer educational questions with a seamless mix of text and creator made video (see launch video https://rynv.uk/hl) or try at https://highlights.boclips.com.• Switched from a hard-to-maintain MongoDB + Spark data pipeline to a more efficient connector + dbt system. Enhancing data sync speed, testing, and accessibility in the BI system for organisational decision-making.

London, Gb

After making the data team productive, I was asked to move into the executive team and do the same for product and engineering by filling the position of the departing CTO/CPO.• Grew and scaled the team to 20 people, adapting the structure through growth pain points.• Hiring and promoting exceptional individuals. Empowering and mentoring them into ownership.• Identified unsustainable revenue model, fostered cross-team collaboration, and implemented a product-led, recurring revenue strategy.Key projects include:• AI generated metadata for customer value (e.g. learning outcomes) and for internal efficiency (e.g. descriptions).• Launch of embed codes to allow instant integration for client, shortening the sales cycle.• AI-assisted alignments of videos to educational curriculums, reducing manual time spent on alignments by 60%.

London, Gb

Established a high-impact data team: delivered valuable projects, built essential infrastructure (process, tools), and fostered rapid iteration with quick feedback loops. This success led to a promotion within 9 months.Key projects included: Identifying and addressing big deficiencies in the product (including various features around search & discovery) and adding new valuable video metadata at scale with machine learning.

London, England, Gb

Running the data team and setting the data strategy. My team's responsibility and scope grew as we developed a reputation for solving difficult problems and delivering very quickly, becoming an end-to-end feature team.Key projects include:• Rebuilt audience generation system: reduced daily builds from 26+ hours (unscalable) to 2 hours (scalable), and live export queries from >5m to <20s.• Built a superior automated web page classifier for hundreds of interests, Enabling our first party data strategy at when the industry was preparing to turn off third party tracking.• Deployed the company's first machine learning models taking demographics coverage from <10% to >90%.

London, England, Gb

I led the data science team of 6 data scientists and data engineers, taking it from an disorganised and unproductive team of talented juniors to an agile, high morale, highly productive team delivering functionally across the business.Key projects:• Re-engineering and expanding the vast data pipelines for reliability, maintainability and enabling rapid development of new features and outputting to a clean queryable data lake and optimised data warehouse comprising multiple TB of data.• Moved client dashboards over to AWS Athena querying the new data warehouse allowing complex queries to be made and features to be built where previously dashboards were built from pre-generated static data.• Deployed the first machine learning feature with modelled user demographics over 100's millions of user profiles.

• Developed predictive models to optimise business-to-business marketing efforts for clients.• Led development of a new “when to call” model that increased conversions by 300%, far exceeding expectations.

London, Greater London, Gb

• Used statistical techniques and signal processing to recover small noisy signals from planets outside the solar system which are buried in the light from their much brighter host stars.• Built an instrument simulator to accurately reproduce Hubble Space Telescope images of exoplanets to investigate systematic errors and bias present in analysis.

London, Gb

Five-week intensive data science workshop consisting of a team project with an industrial partner, lectures, and networking events.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Astrophysics

Msci Natural Sciences, Astrophysics And Molecular And Cell Biology