Senior Engineering Manager, VALORANT Platform & Live Services

HellaGoodAudio; Mercer Island (WA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open PTO policy

Flexible work schedules

Medical, dental, and life insurance

Parental leave

401k with company match

Job summary

Riot Games is seeking a Senior Manager, Software Engineering to lead the VALORANT Platform Engineering team. You will shape the engineering vision, align organizational design, and mentor engineers and managers across multiple global locations.

This role focuses on building scalable workflows, release orchestration, and live service reliability for VALORANT client, servers, and backend services. You will partner with Riot and Tencent teams to improve deployment, observability, and developer

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, incl. backend systems or cloud platforms.
• 4+ years of engineering management experience leading engineers and managers.
• Experience leading live service infrastructure, release engineering, or developer platforms at scale.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, deployment workflows, and operational excellence.
• Ability to drive technical strategy and influence architecture across multiple teams.
• Proficiency with cloud infrastructure and modern backend technologies (Go, Java, C#, or similar).

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a distributed organization of engineers and engineering managers across Los Angeles, Seattle, and Sydney.
• Define the technical and organizational strategy for core services, build, release, live operations, and developer infrastructure.
• Drive improvements to build, validate, deploy, and operate Unreal game clients, servers, and backend services globally.
• Partner with Riot and Tencent engineering teams to improve reliability, release velocity, and developer workflows.
• Establish technical direction across build infrastructure, release engineering, service orchestration, observability, and operational excellence.
• Influence cross-team architecture and engineering standards affecting long-term scalability and reliability.
• Mentor engineering leaders and foster ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Skills

Software engineering

Engineering management

Live service infra

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

Backend development

Job description

Riot Games is seeking a Senior Manager, Software Engineering to lead the VALORANT Platform Engineering team. You will shape the engineering vision, align organizational design, and mentor engineers and managers across multiple global locations.

This role focuses on building scalable workflows, release orchestration, and live service reliability for VALORANT client, servers, and backend services. You will partner with Riot and Tencent teams to improve deployment, observability, and developer