Ryan Cushen's Resume

Experience

Co-Founder, Continual, 2026-

After hours, I am building Continual, a platform for manufacturers to implement Autonomous Maintenance and AI-powered continuous improvement throughout their operations.

Head of AI and Data, PlayHQ, Melbourne, 2024-

Currently leading all things data and AI at PlayHQ, a global sports management platform. My key responsibilities are the design and deployment of production AI systems, internal data platforms, and enterprise data governance. Achievements so far include:

• Launching multiple production AI applications, including an agentic volunteer assistant, automated match reporting, and an AI-powered grading tool, all of which were deeply integrated with our existing technology stack and required bespoke evaluation strategies
• Building and scaling our embedded analytics tool to 10k WAU
• Supporting strategic initiatives such as our recent sale to ASG, which involved running the data room, presenting to potential investors, building financial models, and working closely with the executive team to position our business effectively
• Leading our internal AI program, acting as a technical advisor for adoption of Claude for Work and Claude Code across our business
• Architecting and setting up an internal data platform on Snowflake, including a semantic layer and LLM interface via Claude Desktop
• Instigating full GDPR compliance and acting as the designated Data Protection Officer for our European operations, as well as owning our ongoing ISO27001 compliance posture

Data Science Lead, Prezzee, Melbourne, 2022-2024

Led a five-person data science team at a fast-growing ecommerce startup. My focus was on building out the function's data science and machine learning capability, while enabling the team to act as a key interface between technical and non-technical stakeholders. Key accomplishments included:

• Partnering with product and engineering leadership to embed ML into our products and services – throughout the full ML lifecycle (experimentation, training, testing and cloud deployment)
• Working closely with the CFO to design and implement Prezzee's financial reporting strategy, which used dynamic statistical models to determine our net margin from $2B of annual sales
• Building an automated forecasting system that produces daily demand forecasts for thousands of products, which saved over $100k in write-offs and stock-outs. In addition to designing the machine learning solution, I also developed all of the necessary infrastructure and orchestration within AWS using Terraform.
• Creating a first-party 'fraud lookup tool', which uses graph theory to connect customer personas across transactions and identify patterns in fraud activity
• My team recording the highest engagement and satisfaction scores across the entire business during our annual culture survey, which helped me successfully negotiate the retention of two junior analysts

Manager, Data Science, KPMG, Sydney, 2018-22

Manager within a specialist analytics and data science consulting team, acting as a technical advisor on data and technology strategy for large enterprise clients. Key achievements:

• Led the delivery of multiple large consulting projects for marquee clients, including technical discovery and solution design, ongoing stakeholder management, delivering workshops, and presenting to executives
• Influenced the adoption of data analytics across the broader consulting practice, contributing to 33% growth in team revenue
• Led the development of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool that extracted sentiment and key themes from transactional text data, used across at least 15 projects and central to our process for analysing survey data
• Built a 'process mining' service offering using Celonis to identify bottlenecks and performance improvement opportunities across clients' core financial and operational processes, yielding $60k in new work within six months
• Promoted from Consultant through to Manager within three years

Research Assistant, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2018-19

In addition to my role at KPMG, I assisted Dr Matthew Greenwood-Nimmo in the Faculty of Economics with research, with a focus on Macroeconomics and Econometrics. This primarily involved the development and implementation of econometric models in R, as well as the write-up of results.

Maths Tutor, Manning's Tutors, London, 2016-17

Whilst in London, I worked part-time as a maths and economics tutor, teaching group and one-on-one sessions with middle to secondary school students. These were run through schools, and ranged in scope from struggling GCSE students to high performing A-Level students. Responsibilities included lesson planning, generation of technical course notes, and coordination with teachers regarding learning strategies for specific students.

Education

MSc in Mathematics, The University of New South Wales, 2019 - 2021

Masters degree in mathematics, with a focus on pure math and computer science. I wrote my thesis on dynamical systems and received a High Distinction.

BCom in Economics, The University of Melbourne, 2014 - 2017

First-Class Honours and Dean's Honours List (top 3%). Contributor to Farrago and committee member with the Melbourne Microfinance Initiative.

Projects

Prompt Picker, Web Application

A simple tool that helps optimise system prompts for LLM-driven applications... abandoned.

Sequential, Web Application

Project management tool that models everything as a directed graph... abandoned.

Tableflipper, Web Application

A very niche tool for annotating spreadsheets. Useful if you regularly had exactly the same problem as I did! Else not so much. Abandoned.