Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning - 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.

Youll lead development efforts, steer design processes, and exemplify the team’s engineering culture. VALORANT is Riots 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. Youll 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, youll 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 (Los Angeles Only) Base salary range between $183,300.00 - $256,600.00 USD incentive compensation equity 401K with company match medical, dental, vision, and life insurance short and long-term disability open PTO.