Principal Software Engineer, Game Release & DevCon Lead

Riot Games; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 229,200 - 319,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open PTO

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Life Insurance

Short-term Disability

Long-term Disability

401K with company match

Equity

Incentive compensation

Job summary

Riot Games in Los Angeles seeks a Principal Software Engineer for Developer Connections (DevCon) to shape Riot’s centralized game release capabilities. You will drive architecture across clients, servers, and publishing workflows, partnering with Release Team leadership and game teams to align on technical direction.

The role requires 8+ years in software engineering with live-game shipping experience, strong crisis management, and the ability to balance player impact with production safety and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience and shipping at least one live game.
• Deep domain expertise in end-to-end game shipping lifecycle including production workflows and live ops.
• Experience across game clients, game servers, backend services, configuration, content pipelines, or release orchestration.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills with large-scale production systems.
• Proven crisis response and problem-solving under high-pressure situations.

Responsibilities

• Define Technical Direction for Riot’s centralized game release capabilities, balancing speed, safety, and scale.
• Collaborate with game teams to understand release constraints and address production needs.
• Build cross-team alignment: communicate vision and evaluate value/tradeoffs of release systems.
• Lead end-to-end architecture across clients, servers, services, content, and publishing workflows.
• Drive reliable release decisions to maximize predictability and velocity.
• Provide technical and product judgment, weighing player impact and platform constraints.
• Advise leadership by linking engineering strategy to partner adoption.
• Raise engineering standards across design, architecture, and operations.
• Diagnose blockers and work with engineers to drive solutions to production.

Job description

Riot Games in Los Angeles seeks a Principal Software Engineer for Developer Connections (DevCon) to shape Riot’s centralized game release capabilities. You will drive architecture across clients, servers, and publishing workflows, partnering with Release Team leadership and game teams to align on technical direction.

The role requires 8+ years in software engineering with live-game shipping experience, strong crisis management, and the ability to balance player impact with production safety and