Principal Machine Learning Engineer - League of Legends (AI/ML)

Location: Based at the Los Angeles headquarters, United States

Salary: $292,300–$437,900 USD base salary, plus incentive compensation, equity, and benefits.

Company

Riot Games develops player-focused games and experiences, including League of Legends.

What you will do

• Lead AI/ML workflows, MLOps, automation, deployment standards, and self-healing pipelines for League of Legends.
• Design and implement scalable ML serving architectures and APIs for global production workloads.
• Lead ML feature platforms and data pipeline improvements addressing scale, latency, and reliability constraints.
• Define developer experience, tooling, observability, incident response, cost optimization, and operational standards for AI/ML systems.
• Establish governance, privacy, security, cryptography, and compliance practices for ML platforms.
• Mentor senior engineers, coach across disciplines, and contribute to recruiting standards and interview kits.

Requirements

• 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.
• Experience leading platforms adopted and relied upon by multiple teams or products.
• Deep operational experience with ML systems at scale, including training-serving skew, degradation, and cost management.
• Background in cloud-native orchestration and large-scale system design, including Kubernetes, GPU scheduling, and container orchestration.
• Experience improving ML developer productivity and mentoring senior or staff-level engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience building ML platforms serving multiple products or game titles.
• Experience solving novel scale, latency, or reliability problems in ML data pipelines.
• Background in ML governance, security, privacy-preserving techniques, or organizational compliance.
• Passion for player experience, games, or creative technology.

Culture & Benefits

• Player-first culture focused on collaborative teams and diverse perspectives.
• Open paid time off policy and flexible work schedules.
• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• Parental leave for employees, spouses or domestic partners, and children.
• 401(k) with company match, equity, incentive compensation, and short- and long-term disability coverage.