Ryan Orban
I help technical founders and teams build ambitious AI systems without getting lost in abstractions or hype.
If you're looking for help on PMF experiments, AI/infra choices, or fundraising narrative, start with office hours. For ongoing work, see my advising details.
Background
Previously: built and scaled programs that placed talent into Tesla, Facebook, Google; shipped hands-on data/ML products; and ran large-scale deployments in the federal space.
Founder, Cadea
Created secure workspace chatbots with RBAC-aware RAG and agentic pipelines for regulated data. Built working prototypes, learned the market was early, returned remaining funds, and distilled playbooks for secure LLM adoption (red-teaming, data governance, evals).
CTO, Tribe AI
Led product/infra for a network of 150+ senior ML practitioners. Standardized delivery playbooks, improved scoping → delivery cycle time, and served as tech lead for client work across LLM prototyping, recommender systems, and data platforms.
Head of Data Science, Placement.com
Owned data products for job-seeker outcomes: ranking, matching, funnel analytics, and experimentation. Improved placement conversion via combining Elasticsearch with Learning To Rank, BERT embeddings, and Bayesian A/B testing.
CTO, Galvanize
Post-acquisition integration of Zipfian. Scaled data science curriculum nationwide; hired and managed instructor teams; stood up enterprise training and assessments; aligned pedagogy with industry needs.
Founder & CEO, Zipfian Academy
Bootstrapped one of the first immersive data science programs. 10-person team; >$1M revenue in year one; graduates placed at top tech firms. Built the original format and curriculum that many programs later echoed.
Sr. Systems Engineer, Nutanix
Distributed systems engineer turned sales engineer covering Federal customers in Army/Air Force/IC. Designed and deployed $100M+ clusters, led large-scale POCs, and translated hard infra constraints into deployable, resilient systems.
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