The ML Platform team will be known for technical excellence, usability, and accelerating ML innovation. The team will enable Riot teams to deploy and manage ML models across games and products with low operational overhead and high confidence in quality, allowing them to focus on delivering ML-powered player experiences instead of building one-off solutions.

Riot Games is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to start and grow a new team building our next generation machine learning platform. This platform will serve as the backbone for delivering production grade ML across Riot, enabling teams working on multiple games and products to deploy, operate, and scale ML models with confidence. As the founding leader, you will blend technical execution with product-minded leadership. You will shape a clear technical roadmap and deliver capabilities that make machine learning faster, more reliable, and easier to operate across Riot. You will hire and develop a world-class team of ML platform and service/infra engineers. Your work will directly enable high-impact ML use cases in areas like personalization, game AI, and content generation. 

Responsibilities

Team & Organizational Leadership

• Build and lead a new ML Platform team from the ground up, hiring, mentoring, and growing both ICs and future leads.
• Set cultural and operational foundations for an inclusive, sustainable, and high performing team.
• Manage both engineers and managers, providing coaching and performance feedback to maintain a high craft bar.
• Partner with recruiting to attract top ML platform and infrastructure talent.

Platform Product Delivery

• Define and drive the ML Platform roadmap to serve multiple games and products, balancing foundational investments with fast delivery of developer-facing capabilities.
• Ensure delivery of core platform features including scalable inference serving, model artifact CI/CD, versioning, observability, and controlled deployment methods (A/B, shadow).
• Guide architecture and standards for data and feature systems, model governance, and platform security.
• Champion developer experience by building tools, APIs, and workflows that enable ML engineers and data scientists to move quickly with confidence.

Execution, Alignment, and Stakeholder Management

• Build strong partnerships with applied ML engineers, data scientists, game teams, platform engineering, SRE, and security to ensure platform adoption and reliability.
• Coordinate cross-team dependencies and remove delivery blockers.
• Track platform adoption and impact across products, iterating based on developer feedback and operational metrics.
• Ensure platform capabilities meet cost, latency, reliability, and security goals in production environments.

Required Qualifications: 

• Proven track record leading engineering teams that build and operate platforms or infrastructure used across multiple products.
• 4+ years of engineering management experience, including managing managers or team leads, and 10+ years of total software engineering experience.
• Experience delivering developer-facing technical products, especially ML platforms, infrastructure, or tools used by other engineers and data scientists.
• Working knowledge of production ML systems, including model serving, CI/CD for ML artifacts, observability, and cost and performance optimization.
• Familiarity with cloud-native orchestration and large-scale system design (for example, Kubernetes, GPU scheduling, container orchestration).
• Ability to define and execute a technical roadmap, translating long-term vision into clear priorities and removing delivery blockers.
• Hands-on background in one or more areas of ML platform engineering such as MLOps, model serving, feature platforms, ML governance, or platform security.
• Experience with controlled deployment methods for ML (A/B testing, shadow deployments) in latency-sensitive environments.
• Strong collaboration skills for working across ML, data science, platform engineering, SRE, and security teams

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 focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and 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.

At Riot Games, we put players first. That mission drives every decision in our quest to create games and experiences that make it better to be a player. Whether you’re working directly on a new player-facing experience or you’re supporting the company as a whole, everyone at Riot is part of our mission. And just like in our games, we’re better when we work together. Our goal is to create collaborative teams where you are empowered to bring your unique perspective everyday. If that sounds like the kind of place you want to work, we’re looking forward to your application.

It’s our policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and members of Riot Games, Inc. Riot Games makes reasonable accommodations for handicapped and disabled Rioters and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, handicap, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law. We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.

Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:

• Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company data
• Communication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minors
• Accessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networks
• Ensuring a safe interactive environment for players and other Rioters

These duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization. Please note that job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security.