Sr. Manager, Machine Learning Engineering - Game Tech Group, Anti-Cheat

Engineering managers at Riot are technical leaders first—they stay close to the craft, make grounded architectural decisions, and earn credibility through the quality of their technical judgment and its impact on Riot’s ability to deliver for players. They are deeply invested in people: building diverse teams, growing individual careers, and creating environments where engineers can do the best work of their lives. The best Riot engineering managers hold both of these responsibilities without trading one for the other.

Anti-Cheat is Riot’s first defense against cheaters that don’t want to play fair. As a cross-discipline team of former cheaters, kernel developers, machine learning engineers, data analysts, and software engineers, they make products like Vanguard to detect and ban the bad guys across all of Riot’s competitive titles and platforms, staying vigilant to whatever shape they’ll take in response.  From beaming bots to scorching scripters, anti-cheat enables Riot’s game teams to take on competitive genres and design rewarding systems that would otherwise be too vulnerable to fraudsters and cheaters. As a Sr. Manager of Machine Learning Engineering on Anti-Cheat, you will lead a group of teams, including Data Analytics, Data Engineering, and ML Engineering, unified in a quest to both operationally support day-to-day anti-cheat operations and cook the ML-powered weaponry that will ultimately upgrade them. You will own the entire group’s roadmap, ensuring a coherent technical approach to modelling, warehousing, and engineering across all of anti-cheat, while also fostering strong alignment with partnering games and organizations.  Your responsibilities will include converting product priorities into tangible technical strategies, optimizing data team compositions to achieve these goals, and deeply contributing to all projects involved on a profoundly technical level.  Your success will be measured through both the statistical and the perceived fairness of Riot’s competitive ladders. You will report to the Director of Anti-Cheat.

• Use all of anti-cheat’s resources to help design, build, and maintain AI/ML pipelines from end-to-end, creating an iterative, ever-evolving series of classifiers, capable of adapting in perpetuity as attackers learn from its actions.
• Leverage Riot’s centralized ML infrastructure where possible, upgrade it where necessary, and ensure that any realized technical capabilities can be capitalized on by other teams and products.
• Innovate in the anomaly detection space by creating proven, trusted player outcomes from novel and even theoretical modelling approaches.
• Drive AI/ML pipeline development and deployment standards across teams, coordinating with data engineering on shared MLOps capabilities.
• Manage individual contributors and team-level managers of a variety of shapes: Data Engineers, Data Analysts, ML Engineers while also helping shepherd the unique “Anti-Cheat Analyst” craft that amalgamates detections, reconnaissance, and player support.
• Evaluate overall team composition, identifying gaps in skills, seniority, and capacity that could impact roadmap delivery; take a proactive role in resource allocation and strategic development of team capabilities.
• Clearly articulate and demonstrate good ML engineering practices; recognize when to lean in and help directly when necessary.
• Ensure the group stays current with AI/ML developments and has high contextual awareness of company and industry direction; separate signal from noise in service of product and technical strategy.

• BS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 10+ years of industry experience, including experience as a Senior ML Engineer or higher.
• 4+ years of management experience, including experience managing managers or team leads.
• Evidence that teams you’ve led have shipped ML systems that other teams or products depend on.  Not just prototypes, but production systems with real operational weight.
• Experience translating a long-term technical vision into a roadmap that your teams successfully executed against, with evidence of course-correcting when priorities shifted.
• Working knowledge of production ML systems.  You can engage credibly on model serving, CI/CD for ML, observability, and cost tradeoffs, even if you’re not writing the code daily (but you can also write the code daily).
• Comfort representing ML capabilities in cross-disciplinary forums and translating technical tradeoffs for product, design, and leadership audiences.
• History of working at the boundary between research and production, where interesting problems require both scientific rigor and engineering pragmatism.

• Experience building iterative machine classifiers for behavioral anomalies in competitive video games.
• Hands-on experience in threat detection for risk, fraud, insurance, security, sports, or gaming spaces.
• Passion for player experience, games, or creative technology.

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!

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.