About Colton.

"A data and analytics leader who believes that great compensation strategy is equal parts science and storytelling — and that the best insights don't live in the spreadsheet, they live in the decisions it enables."

I'm Colton Riley — an MBA-trained data leader currently serving as Lead Data & Reporting Analyst on Charter Communications' National Incentives team in Stamford, CT. My work sits at the intersection of compensation design, financial modeling, and organizational strategy, and I'm fortunate to do it at enterprise scale.

As a founding member of our National Incentives team, I helped nationalize a fragmented, regionally-siloed $50MM incentive program into a unified operation that now governs $1.2B in annual variable compensation paid to 40,000 employees across all of Charter's Small Business sales channels. This wasn't just a data migration — it was building the analytical infrastructure, governance frameworks, and stakeholder relationships from scratch.

More recently, I've led our team's adoption of AI tooling — specifically Claude, AWS, and Kiro — to streamline analyst workflows and automate reporting that previously consumed significant manual effort. I believe AI isn't a replacement for analytical rigor; it's a multiplier for it.

Before Charter, I spent several years in financial services as a Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch and Oppenheimer, where I built a $38MM AUM book and collaborated on a $200MM Series B raise. Earlier in my career I worked in real estate finance, deploying $250MM+ for a publicly traded REIT and building the Excel-based systems that made it all trackable.

I hold an MBA from UC Irvine's Paul Merage School of Business, a B.A. in Economics from Hamilton College, and a CFP certificate from Bryant University. Outside work, I stay active — running and cycling around Stamford — and I'm always reading about where data, AI, and organizational design are heading next.

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Awards & Honors.