Connor Riley is the co-founder and CTO of Ontra Mobility, a Y Combinator S24 company building connected software for public transit planning, operations, and rider experience. He built Ontra’s platform from the ground up, owns platform engineering and applied modeling, and co-leads product strategy.

His work spans demand forecasting, service-design optimization, timetable optimization, multimodal journey planning, rider applications, and cloud infrastructure. At Ontra, he has delivered planning systems for DDOT, Madera Metro, and the City of Fresno; led technical delivery of Longwood Commutes; and is advancing a 2026 Transit Tech Lab proof of concept with MTA New York City Transit and the Long Island Rail Road.

Previously, Connor was a software engineer on Google’s Display Ads Optimization team and a Senior Research Engineer at the NSF AI Institute for Advances in Optimization at Georgia Tech. At AI4OPT, he led a five-person research team developing multimodal trip-planning, ridesharing, and dispatch systems.

Connor holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Georgia Tech. His research combines mathematical optimization, machine learning, and model-predictive control for large-scale real-time ridesharing. His first-author systems scaled to 30,000 requests per hour and reduced mean waits by up to 55% in high-demand zones. He was a primary architect of MARTA Reach, which served 8,332 riders with approximately eight-minute average waits and 94% rider satisfaction, and CAT SMART. He also built the dispatch algorithm for the University of Michigan’s RITMO pilot.