Riotgames Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Riotgames leading AI/ML platform strategy and operations for League of Legends. Responsible for building scalable ML systems, automation, and governance.
Responsibilities
As a Principal AI/ML Platform Engineer for League of Legends, you will set ML platform and integration strategy that enables League teams to build, launch, and operate player and developer facing ML experiences. You will build the systems, tooling, and operational standards that enable teams to deploy and operate ML at global scale. Your technical direction will influence product strategy and your work will directly shape how League of Legends evolves player-facing experiences. Your work will span year-plus efforts on League, mentoring and coaching across disciplines. You will report to the Senior ML Engineering Manager within the League of Legends game team. This role is based out of our Los Angeles area headquarters.
Lead AI/ML workflow and MLOps for League of Legends; build automation standards including auto-remediation and self-healing pipelines; drive implementation.
Create AI/ML serving architecture that scales to production load for Riot’s player base; design systems requiring minimal operational intervention; drive implementation of proven serving architectures.
Build ML feature platforms to scale feature development and processing; solve scale, latency, or reliability constraints in ML data pipelines.
Lead AI/ML developer experience that accelerates development; remove workflow bottlenecks and enable new capabilities.
Lead AI/ML governance in partnership with compliance experts to ensure regulatory adherence; drive implementation of proven frameworks.
Ensure AI/ML platform security in partnership with security teams; drive implementation of proven privacy, security, and cryptography techniques for AI/ML.
Create AI/ML pipeline development and deployment standards, coordinating with data engineering on shared MLOps capabilities.
Craft AI/ML service development and API standards across product integrations.
Drive operational excellence and cost optimization for AI/ML systems across the organization.
Run incident management and set response standards for AI/ML systems across production services.
Build observability and monitoring standards for AI/ML systems across services.
Qualification
Track record solving novel scaleBackground in ML governancePassion for player experienceFor this role
Required
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years building production ML platforms, systems, or MLOps capabilities.
Evidence that platforms or systems you’ve led have become load-bearing for multiple teams or products — adopted, depended on, and evolved beyond the original scope.
Deep operational intuition for ML systems at scale: you’ve lived through the failure modes (training-serving skew, silent degradation, cost spirals) and built the systems to prevent them.
Background in cloud-native orchestration and large-scale system design (Kubernetes, GPU scheduling, container orchestration) applied at global scale.
History of improving developer experience for ML practitioners in ways that measurably changed how fast or reliably they shipped.
Track record mentoring senior and staff-level engineers; evidence of elevating platform engineering judgment across an organization.
Experience building ML platforms that serve multiple products or game titles simultaneously is a plus.
Track record solving novel scale, latency, or reliability constraints in ML data pipelines is a plus.
Background in ML governance, security, privacy-preserving techniques, or compliance at organizational scale is a plus.
Passion for player experience, games, or creative technology.
For this role, you will 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!
