About the role
Role Overview
Riot Engineers on Anti-Cheat are builders, trailblazers, and stewards of competitive integrity. They protect the legitimacy of Riot’s multiplayer games by designing resilient platforms, developing robust internal tools, and staying ahead of adversarial threats without losing sight of the player experience.
As a Staff Software Engineer on Vanguard’s Platform Services team, you will operate at the intersection of platform services, internal developer tooling, and ecosystem design. You will be responsible for supporting a platform that serves millions of players, supporting internal tools that serve hundreds of Player Support agents and developing cutting edge technology to help prevent, detect and deter cheaters from getting into our games. This is a hands-on staff role for an engineer who thrives on rolling up their sleeves and building services in a fast-paced and innovative environment. You will help lead through technical expertise and soft skills, influencing the direction of the team both through code and a deep drive to understand and improve the product. You will partner closely with engineers, stakeholders, and anti-cheat experts across the entire Vanguard stack to build performant and impactful tools and services in support of our Players. You will report to the Engineering Manager of Platform Services within Anti-Cheat.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and evolve shared backend platform services that power Vanguard systems across client, services, and internal tooling
- Own APIs and service contracts used by multiple teams, ensuring reliability, clarity, and long-term maintainability
- Lead the development of internal tools and web applications used for operations, investigations, configuration, and visibility
- Identify and reduce systemic risks across the platform (scalability, operability, security, maintainability)
- Design and operate distributed backend systems with high availability and strong security guarantees
- Partner in incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements
- Improve CI/CD pipelines, observability, and operational workflows for platform services
- Collaborate across Anti-Cheat, Security, and Game teams as a trusted technical partner
Required Qualifications
- Staff-level experience building and owning backend platforms and internal tools used by multiple teams
- Strong experience with backend service development and distributed systems (e.g., AWS, Docker, Kubernetes)
- Significant experience building internal tools or web applications using modern web stacks (e.g., Golang, React, Node.js, TypeScript)
- Experience designing and maintaining APIs and shared services in a large or growing ecosystem
- Comfort operating and debugging live, production systems
- Strong architectural judgment and experience influencing key technical decisions
- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset
Desired Qualifications
- Experience working on platform teams or internal developer tooling
- Experience designing systems with security and adversarial thinking in mind
- Background supporting high-availability services or operational tooling
- Experience mentoring engineers at all levels
- Experience building developer platforms or sandbox environments for rapid experimentation
- A strong understanding of LLMs, Agentic AI based development, and their respective strengths and weaknesses
Additional Requirements and Success Factors
For this role, you will 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.
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. Job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security.
Compensation and Benefits
- Location: Los Angeles, USA
- Base Salary Range: $192,500.00 - $269,400.00 USD
- Additional Compensation: Incentive compensation, equity, and 401K with company match
- Insurance: Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance
- Leave: Short and long-term disability, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and an open paid time off policy
- Work/Life Balance: Flexible work schedules