Manager – SRE Site Lead - Software Engineering

The Riot Operations Center (ROC) delivers 24/7 live response for issues that impact our players. The ROC maintains three sites around the world to provide this coverage, embracing SRE best practices, proactive incident reduction, and an engineering-focused culture. Each site acts independently while keeping its processes and direction aligned with those of the ROC as a whole. Our Site Leads direct their teams in driving technical triage, developing systems for incident mitigation, and creating solutions to reduce incidents across all current and future Riot games.

As a Manager, Software Engineering you will ensure that the Dublin ROC Site is providing high quality live response during its share of the ROC’s follow-the-sun coverage model. You will actively grow the engineering skillset and mindset of your engineers, and be accountable for the technical quality of the team’s work. You will actively grow your team to not only be rock-solid Incident Commanders, but to be expert systems and software triagers as well. You will develop and lead a team of technical sleuths that can accelerate finding the source and the dependencies of any problem at Riot.

You’re right for this role if the idea of growing a new kind of engineering team at Riot and coaching engineers to succeed excites you. You believe SRE is a valuable role you play, not a title you are given. You know in your bones that triage, problem identification, and early detection are essential engineering skills, and you want to teach them to others. You cultivate relationships to provide your team with the support it needs to execute and grow. You use iterative approaches to problems and know how to compromise between ideal solutions and practical outcomes. You believe that just because something is hard doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

Responsibilities:

• Manage the Site's engineering staff for growth and performance
• Ensure the Site’s engineers receive active mentorship to develop their technical and soft skills
• Manage the Site’s response coverage and on-call, participating in the on-call rotation as an Incident Commander
• Manage the Site’s capacity for project work and incident response, and drive and report on site performance metrics
• Act as the Site’s technical lead, doing hands-on technical work, code reviews, and design reviews, and defining what good looks like for alerting and incident response automation
• Drive toward an AI-focused future for our incident response and systems triage
• Manage stakeholders during critical incident triages and major launches working alongside TPM teams
• Handle Site-specific HR tasks such as local hiring and retention

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field or relevant professional experience
• 2+ Years experience as a Senior Software Engineer or higher
• 2+ Years experience performance managing engineers including hiring, coaching, and career development
• Demonstrated experience triaging software in large production systems that you yourself didn't write
• Demonstrated experience as an Incident Commander, leading incidents with authority regardless of the other titles or roles present
• Demonstrated experience eliminating alert fatigue with proper alerting design
• Demonstrated experience leading and implementing SRE best practices and actively developing engineers in the SRE space
• Demonstrated experience designing, writing, prioritizing, and maintaining high-capacity, high-availability, and high-performance software, especially back-end services
• Demonstrated experience working in container-based ecosystems and with a container scheduler (e.g. Marathon, Mesos, Kubernetes, GKE, Amazon ECS)
• Demonstrated ability to work across multiple organizations and generate alignment on technical standards

Preferred Qualifications:

• 4+ Years working in a high performance Site Reliability capacity
• Experience working in a global follow-the-sun model, with proficiency in communicating across timezones.
• Experience with distributed systems, specifically microservices
• Understanding of relational databases such as MySQL
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, ideally Jenkins, Github Actions, or equivalent
• Understanding of software performance and the influence of latency in online games 
• Experience with AWS (or comparable cloud environments)

For this role, you'll 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!

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 Riot will support your retirement benefits with a company match, and double down on your donations of time and money to non-profit charitable organizations. 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.