Riot Engineers bring deep knowledge of specific technical areas but also value the chance to work in many broader domains. As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll also dive into projects that focus on team cohesiveness and cross-team goals. You’ll lead without authority and provide other engineers with a clear illustration of extraordinary engineering. In this role, you will be enabling productionized machine learning across all of Riot, at a global scale. You’ll be applying modern MLOps practices: streamlining deployment, simplifying operations, and creating reliable infrastructure that empowers data scientists, ML engineers, and product teams to deliver value quickly and confidently. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll design and implement methods for model deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management. You’ll work on enabling all kinds of AI/ML by creating critical infrastructure; think model orchestration, feature stores, vector DBs, and everything in between. Your contributions will make ML & AI easier to adopt and operate across Riot, helping game and platform teams deliver high-impact machine learning solutions more efficiently. You will report to the Engineering Manager with Riot's Game Technology Group. ## Responsibilities:
Implement and support ML inference infrastructure for real-time and batch serving, including deployment pipelines and CPU/GPU-aware orchestration
Contribute to CI/CD workflows for ML artifacts, helping enable rapid iteration and safe promotion from development to production
Implement platform observability features such as monitoring, drift detection, resource utilization, and latency tracking
Support ML deployment best practices, including multi-version models, blue/green rollouts, shadow deployments, and safe rollback strategies
Be thoughtful on developer UX and incorporate an iterative approach to improving
Help lead long-term platform architecture, providing input into design decisions and contributing to team discussions
Contribute upstream to shared infra initiatives and build feedback loops and collaboration models with other Riot platform teams
Collaborate with researchers and game teams to understand product needs and build generalizable, reusable solutions
Required Qualifications:
6+ years of experience in software engineering, with time spent on ML/AI, platform or infrastructure teams
Experience maintaining cloud-agnostic inference platforms (e.g. KServe) or running open source frameworks (Feast, Milvus, etc.) in a production environment
Experience with one or more inference serving frameworks (e.g., NVIDIA Triton, TorchServe, BentoML, Seldon Core etc)
Familiarity with GPU orchestration, performance tuning, and cost-aware scheduling
Exposure to CI/CD workflows, infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform), and artifact management
Maintained or led development of services within a service-oriented architecture
Desired Qualifications:
Proficiency in Python and experience with package management tools (e.g., Conda, Poetry)
Exposure to AB testing and experimentation frameworks, especially in online model evaluation
Familiarity with machine learning workflows (e.g., training, validation, deployment, monitoring) and experience working with data scientists
Passion for player experience, game systems, or creative technology development
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. 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.
