Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning - Riot Games Data

Engineers at Riot master their craft by building, launching, and operating games that delight players all over the world. As a Staff Software Engineer you will dive into projects that focus on team cohesiveness and cross-team goals. You'll lead development efforts, steer design processes, and exemplify the team’s engineering culture.

VALORANT is Riot's take on a character-based tactical shooter (for more info on VALORANT click here!). As a Staff Software Engineer on the VALORANT team you will build player-facing game features powered by machine learning services. You will support and improve the way VALORANT game clients, game servers, and backend services publish and process data at global scale, and how we automate the preparation and processing of that data in our data warehouse. You will collaborate with engineers, data scientists, producers, game designers and other disciplines in using data to drive player impact. You'll influence the technical direction for how data services around Riot are built and operated. You will also collaborate with international colleagues, especially teams supporting VALORANT in China. This role reports to the lead of the VAL Data Ops team within Riot’s central data organization.

Responsibilities:

• Create and advance the technical vision for how data is used to improve VALORANT while also investing in the larger data ecosystem
• Lead development of game features that integrate machine learning and experimentation into the game server, backend services, and data warehouse
• Extend VALORANT’s ML ecosystem by helping the team earn new opportunities with compelling prototypes, by hardening existing systems, and by onboarding new customers to our models and services
• Support data scientists and analysts with tools and automation that make their workflows more efficient and repeatable
• Ensure that data systems meet game team standards for reliability and maintainability
• Create and contribute to engineering best practices, development processes, and coding standards on VALORANT
• Mentor other data developers on the team

Required Qualifications:

• 6+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Fluency in Mandarin, including spoken and written communication on technical topics
• Experience building software across multiple languages (e.g., Golang, Python, or C++)
• Experience designing, building, and contributing to the live operations of high throughput distributed systems in microservice ecosystems
• Experience leading the development and operation of large-scale machine learning systems, including gathering requirements, designing production-ready architectures, and sustainably supporting high availability services
• Experience collaborating on projects across multiple teams and disciplines, including with data scientists and analysts
• Experience with data processing (e.g., Spark, BigQuery, DataProc), storage (e.g., S3, Google Cloud Storage), transport (e.g., Kafka, PubSub), and orchestration (e.g., Airflow, Luigi)
• Experience deploying cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP) using containers and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), managed using infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible)
• Familiarity with tools used in ML model training (e.g. Tensorflow, PyTorch, Mlflow), high performance inference engines (e.g., Triton, BentoML), or MLOps frameworks (e.g., Seldon, Kubeflow)
• Experience coaching those around them across all roles, and mentoring mid and senior level engineers

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes the delight of players. We will be looking at your past studies, experience, and your personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this could be your role!

Our Perks:

Riot has a focus on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy, in addition to other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code . Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work. We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do, and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect. We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming .