Senior Manager of Software Engineering, Riot Games

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering
• 8+ years of management experience, including managing engineers and team leads
• Experience founding or scaling global infrastructure/platform teams from the ground up
• Demonstrated ability to lead delivery of technical products used by other developers, engineers, or researchers
• Working knowledge of production ML systems, including model inference, CI/CD for ML artifacts, observability, and cost optimization
• Experience with cloud-native orchestration architectures (e.g., Kubernetes, GPU scheduling, container orchestration)
• Strong execution skills—ability to translate long-term vision into well-scoped milestones, track progress, and unblock teams
• Comfortable making trade-offs between velocity, cost, and maintainability while managing stakeholder expectations

Desirable

• Riot engineers bring deep knowledge of specific technical areas but also value the opportunity to work in a variety of broader domains
• As Engineering Managers, we gain organizational alignment by building a strong engineering vision and offering creative solutions to organizational design
• We also serve as mentors for a team of engineers, overseeing their performance and trying to find stretch opportunities for their growth
• As the founding Sr. Manager, Software Engineering on the ML Platform team, you’ll blend technical execution with product-minded leadership—building a high-performing team, aligning stakeholders and consumers, architecting a clear roadmap, and delivering best in class ML platform milestones along the needs of real-world users across Riot’s games and services
• You’ll guide the development of core infrastructure for global ML inference at scale on both GPU and CPU, model deployment, observability, live testing (A/B and shadow deployments), and model versioning—delivering a platform that is robust, cost-efficient, and extensible for Riot’s present and future needs
• Your team’s work will directly enable high-impact ML use cases across Riot’s games and internal products for players around the world
• You will report to the Director of Data Science on the team
• Build and lead a new ML Platform team from the ground up—recruiting, mentoring, and growing both ICs and future leads
• Set the cultural and operational foundations for a sustainable, inclusive, and high-performing engineering team
• Collaborate technical leadership (including Riot, AI Foundations, and the ML Platform P5 Principal Engineer) to ensure architectural decisions are grounded in Riot’s long-term needs
• Drive the team’s roadmap and execution—balancing foundational investments with fast, iterative delivery of user-visible platform capabilities
• Align closely with data scientists, ML engineers, and game product teams to deeply understand workflows, pain points, and infrastructure needs
• Champion developer experience, designing for usability and self-service adoption from day one
• Own the delivery of the ML Platform’s early feature set: scalable inference serving, model artifact CI/CD, versioning, testing environments (A/B, shadow), and observability
• Coordinate cross-team dependencies and build strong partnerships with platform engineering, SRE, security, and product stakeholders
• Ensure the platform meets critical non-functional goals such as cost-efficiency, operational reliability, and regional availability
• Represent the ML Platform team in broader AI Foundations and Riot-wide planning forums—connecting strategy to execution and ensuring alignment with Riot’s broader technical ecosystem