Staff Software Engineer - Legends of Runeterra, Services

Riot engineers bring deep knowledge of specific technical areas but also value the chance to work in multiple broader domains. As a Staff Software Engineer on Legends of Runeterra, you will be involved in a broad range of technology challenges. You will work together with other disciplines in delivering an end-to-end, live, game-as-a-service, Collectible Card Game (CCG) on PC and Mobile experience to players.

To do so you will own, improve, and develop new features for our core back-end microservice stack. This stack serves players globally around the world. You’ll help make key decisions around refactoring, tuning, and fixing our backend microservices to unlock potential for our developers and designers. This role is also the front-line defense against emergent bugs that impact large numbers of players. 

Internal Job title: Software Engineer III. This is a full-time role, based in Sydney, Australia. 

On this team, you will be:

• Player-Focused: You have strong player empathy, and you want to find solutions that make players excited to experience our game. 
• A Collaborator: You want to work elbow-to-elbow with members of other disciplines (such as Art or Game Design) to build a whole experience. You are excited to see problems from a different point of view, and make hard tradeoffs to meet multiple goals.
• An Optimizer; Tuning is in your heart: Inefficiency bothers you and you work to create well-oiled machines whenever you can.
• Adaptable: You understand and are comfortable with switching gears between optimization, break/fix, development, and understand the need for rapid re-prioritization.
• Inclusive: You resist siloing yourself, you seek input, feedback and ask a lot of questions whenever you can to build understanding and empathy for others.

Responsibilities:

• Collaborating with team-leads delivering value to players on a monthly release cadence.
• Creating technical designs for new features, breaking down multi-month projects into smaller projects and tasks.
• Design, build, and maintain C# microservices to support a live Unity game. 
• Build scalable APIs to support gameplay, content, and meta-game systems.
• Collaborate with client engineers to ensure seamless feature delivery.
• Maintaining, scaling, and troubleshooting cloud infrastructure.
• Monitor and improve service performance, reliability, and observability.
• Support and improve CI/CD and developer workflows in support of feature teams.
• Implementing and championing engineering standards to ensure high quality code.
• Coaching more junior engineers through code reviews and 1-on-1 feedback.
• Troubleshoot live service issues as part of an on-call rotation.

Required Qualifications: 

• 7+ years of collective experience in professional software development.
• 3+ years experience with compiled object oriented languages (C++, Java, C#, etc.).
• Experience building and scaling backend systems in production environments.
• Experience with containerized services (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with cloud-based infrastructure (AWS, GCP, etc.).
• Strong grasp of service observability (logs, metrics, tracing).
• Experience breaking down and leading execution of multi-month work efforts in scope collaborating with team leadership. This regularly includes collaboration across disciplines and other teams of engineers.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Desired Qualifications:

• ​​Experience developing high-performance services at global scale.
• Experience with scripting languages (python, bash, ruby, Node.js, etc.).
• Familiarity with SQL, relational databases, caching systems (e.g. Redis), and pub/sub systems (e.g. Kafka, HornetQ, RabbitMQ, etc.).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and tools.
• Experience working with non-engineering disciplines (Art, Design, Audio, UI/UX, etc.).
• Proficiency with Agile/Scrum and understanding of its value to work processes.
• Experience mentoring team members to level up their technical capabilities.

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:

At Riot we strongly believe in work / life balance, and we encourage that with our open paid time off policy, paid parental leave (for both primary and secondary carers) and flexible work schedules to fit your lifestyle. We also believe that work should be fun, we have co-op gaming areas, a play fund so you can broaden and deepen your knowledge of players and community, and all the snacks you would ever need to power through your day (even healthy snacks!). And that’s not all we offer, there’s also:

• Medical Insurance that covers you and your dependents
• Employee Assistance Program
• Wellness fund
• Donation matching of time and money to registered charities
• Learning and Development opportunities

Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code. Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work. We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do, and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect. We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming.