Principal Data Engineer (Teamfight Tactics)

Location: Based out of the Los Angeles headquarters, United States

Company

Riot Games develops games and player experiences, including the live-service game Teamfight Tactics.

What you will do

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Teamfight Tactics' data ecosystem.
• Design, build, and operate scalable batch and near-real-time systems for telemetry, player behavior, game operations, experimentation, insights, and player-facing features.
• Establish data contracts, event schemas, metric definitions, instrumentation standards, and launch-readiness practices with engineering, product, design, insights, and data science partners.
• Lead data modeling and warehouse architecture while creating durable, documented sources of truth.
• Own reliability and operational health through data-quality checks, observability, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and root-cause analysis.
• Set engineering standards, optimize costs, improve self-service tooling, mentor practitioners, and contribute to recruiting and technical interviewing.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, software engineering, analytics engineering, or a related discipline, with principal-level scope.
• Production experience designing, building, and operating large-scale data systems.
• Hands-on expertise with Python, Go, Spark, Scala, SQL, Airflow, DBT, AWS or GCP, and Databricks.
• Experience with data modeling, schema design, data contracts, lineage, governance, data quality, SLIs/SLOs, observability, incident management, and operational documentation.
• Ability to lead complex multi-team initiatives, make architecture tradeoffs, communicate cross-functionally, and mentor senior engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience building data systems for a live-service game or high-scale consumer product.
• Experience with game instrumentation, telemetry, schemas, and launch readiness.
• Experience using data to influence gameplay, product, feature, or live-operations decisions.
• Familiarity with Teamfight Tactics, games, player behavior, and live-service operations.
• Player empathy, product sense, and pragmatic judgment.

Culture & Benefits

• Open paid time off policy and flexible work schedules.
• Medical, dental, and life insurance.
• Parental leave for employees, spouses or domestic partners, and children.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Collaborative environment focused on players, inclusion, and bringing diverse perspectives to the work.