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

Location: Based out of Riot Games' Los Angeles area headquarters

Base salary: $292,300.00–$437,900.00 USD annually, plus incentive compensation and equity.

Company

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

What you will do

• Set the ML platform and integration strategy for League of Legends and lead AI/ML workflows, MLOps, deployment standards, and developer experience.
• Design and implement cloud-scale serving architectures, feature platforms, data pipelines, APIs, and automation with self-healing and auto-remediation capabilities.
• Establish governance, privacy, security, cryptography, monitoring, observability, incident response, operational excellence, and cost-optimization standards for AI/ML systems.
• Coordinate shared MLOps capabilities with data engineering and platform integrations across products and game titles.
• Mentor senior engineers, coach developers across disciplines, and contribute to recruiting standards, interview kits, and talent acquisition efforts.

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.
• Evidence that led platforms or systems became load-bearing for multiple teams or products and were adopted, depended on, and evolved beyond their original scope.
• Deep operational experience with ML failure modes at scale, including training-serving skew, silent degradation, and cost spirals.
• Experience with cloud-native orchestration and large-scale system design, including Kubernetes, GPU scheduling, and container orchestration, applied at global scale.
• History of improving ML developer experience and measurably increasing shipping speed or reliability.
• Track record mentoring senior and staff-level engineers and improving platform engineering judgment across an organization.
• Passion for player experience, games, or creative technology.

Nice to have

• Experience building ML platforms serving multiple products or game titles simultaneously.
• Experience solving novel scale, latency, or reliability constraints in ML data pipelines.
• Background in ML governance, security, privacy-preserving techniques, or compliance at organizational scale.

Culture & Benefits

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