Director Machine Learning Engineering - AI Foundations

Riot is building the capabilities to carry AI and machine learning from promise, through prototype, into reliable production systems. AI Foundations helps make that possible by building shared platforms and enabling teams across Riot to deliver meaningful AI-powered outcomes.

We are looking for an engineering leader to oversee the AI Foundations engineering organization. You will be accountable for the technical impact of the group including organizational health, operational excellence, software and machine learning craft quality, and engineering output. All Engineering Managers in AI Foundations will report into this role. 

You will partner with product and executive leaders to connect Riot’s goals to a clear charter, long-term roadmap, and investment choices. The role calls for an organization-level leader who stays technically engaged: close enough to understand the engineering realities, guide important decisions, and address risks, while creating the clarity and space for managers and teams to lead execution.

Responsibilities:

• Set technical strategy and direction. Work with product and engineering partners to shape AI Foundations’ charter, priorities, and long-term roadmap. Translate organizational goals into clear outcomes, make deliberate investment and trade-off decisions, and explain what the organization will and will not take on.
• Lead and develop the engineering management organization. Set clear expectations, coach managers to take ownership and deliver results, uphold a consistent engineering-management and performance bar, and identify and develop future leaders.
• Own the organization’s results. Be accountable for the total output and outcomes of multiple teams. Ensure teams understand their goals and value, evaluate commitments against the roadmap, make delivery and risks visible, and act quickly to unblock or accelerate work when needed.
• Build the organization and its capabilities. Plan for future staffing and skills, identify gaps against the roadmap, and develop role or team proposals grounded in opportunity and cost. Partner with Talent on hiring and onboarding, make hiring decisions at the appropriate level, and drive strategic planning, forecasting, and compensation planning for the organization.
• Guide technical quality and operational ownership. Stay engaged in the technical outcomes across AI/ML, software, data, and agentic systems. Build alignment on architecture and technical strategy; ensure teams deliver reliable, secure, maintainable production systems with appropriate evaluation, observability, incident response, and ownership. Make sound trade-offs across quality, reliability, latency, cost, and technical sustainability.
• Improve how the organization works. Build operating mechanisms that improve efficiency, team health, and delivery transparency. Address recurring friction, misalignment, and unresolved risks directly. Ensure the organization learns from operational issues and changes course as needed.
• Create leverage across Riot. Build trusted partnerships across game teams and central functions. Share reusable engineering patterns, platform capabilities, evaluation approaches, and lessons learned so AI Foundations’ work strengthens Riot’s ability to build and operate AI systems beyond any one team.
• Communicate with clarity. Make decisions, trade-offs, and uncertainty legible to managers, engineers, product partners, game leaders, and executives. Surface risks early, give timely and actionable feedback, and resolve difficult conversations with candor and sound judgment.

Required Qualifications: 

• 12+ years of industry experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, AI, or a closely related discipline, including 8+ years of management experience.
• Proven ability to coach managers, set clear expectations, manage performance, develop future leaders, and maintain a high and consistent engineering bar with accountability for organization-wide outcomes. 
• A strong record of building, shipping, and operating production software, AI/ML systems, or platforms that deliver measurable value to players, customers, or internal teams.
• Strong technical credibility and judgment across software systems and AI/ML—sufficient to assess architecture, quality, operational health, reliability, scale, security, cost, and user impact, and to guide technical direction across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous product or business needs into an organization strategy, long-term roadmap, measurable outcomes, and clear priorities; make trade-offs based on mission, capacity, and impact; and maintain alignment as plans change.
• Experience shaping organizational capacity and capabilities, including identifying skills gaps, planning staffing, and making sound hiring and investment decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to build trust and influence across organizational boundaries, including with product, game, platform, data, research, and executive partners.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with a bias toward clarity, explicit ownership, timely feedback, and candid discussion of uncertainty.
• Sound judgment around responsible AI and production risk, including privacy, security, safety, and the operational consequences of deploying AI-enabled systems.
• Experience in live-service games, interactive entertainment, consumer products, or other high-scale, real-time environments.
• Experience with one or more areas such as generative AI, LLM applications, agentic systems, personalization, recommendations, ranking, player modeling, game AI, reinforcement learning, computer vision, or multimodal systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field; or equivalent practical experience.

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience partnering across data engineering and platform teams on model development and operations, including data and feature pipelines, inference services, orchestration, model registries, evaluation, or ML observability.
• Experience building AI/ML products, shared platforms, developer tools, or technical capabilities used by multiple product groups.
• Graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field.

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise and a collaborative spirit that prioritizes the delight of players. We will look at your past studies and experience, but for this role, we also look for dedicated people with a personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this is the role for you! 

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. We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.

Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:

• Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company data
• Communication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minors
• Accessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networks
• Ensuring a safe interactive environment for players and other Rioters

These duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization. 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.