Senior ML Engineer: Real-Time Game Personalization

Riot Games; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

Life insurance

Paid time off

Retirement match

Play Fund

Donation matching

Job summary

Riot Games is seeking a Sr. Principal ML Engineer to define the modeling architecture powering personalization, matchmaking, and social features across the player ecosystem.

You will lead an AI and modeling layer with product, software, and data engineers to turn data into intelligent, fair experiences for players. You will collaborate on live-service ML pipelines, multi-model orchestration, and responsible AI standards, ensuring low latency and scalable inference for player interactions at

Qualifications

• 15+ years in Machine Learning or Applied AI, with 3+ years in principal or staff-level leadership.
• Deep expertise in graph ML, reinforcement learning, and representation learning.
• Proven experience in real-time, large-scale ML systems such as matchmaking, recommendations, or personalization.
• Strong track record in ML standards, A/B testing, and player experience metrics.
• Background in game development, player behavior modeling, or social ecosystems.
• Experience in trust & safety, toxicity detection, or community health models.
• Familiarity with Vertex AI and SageMaker or internal real-time inference platforms.
• Proven ability to integrate ML systems with live-service game backends.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the modeling architecture powering personalization, matchmaking, and social experiences.
• Lead ML modeling layer with cross-functional teams to convert data into intelligent experiences.
• Build real-time inference systems for personalized content, offers, and player interactions at scale.
• Drive multi-objective optimization balancing fairness, latency, and quality of experience.
• Establish evaluation protocols for match quality, satisfaction, and toxicity mitigation.
• Mentor senior ML engineers and data scientists; guide system design and experimentation practices.

Skills

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Graph ML

Reinforcement learning

Representation learning

Real-time ML systems

A/B testing

Experiment design

Fairness & safety

Live-service ML

Vertex AI

SageMaker

Ray

Kafka

Flink

Redis

Cost-aware ML deployment

Tools

Vertex AI

SageMaker

Ray

Kafka

Flink

Redis

Job description

Riot Games is seeking a Sr. Principal ML Engineer to define the modeling architecture powering personalization, matchmaking, and social features across the player ecosystem.

You will lead an AI and modeling layer with product, software, and data engineers to turn data into intelligent, fair experiences for players. You will collaborate on live-service ML pipelines, multi-model orchestration, and responsible AI standards, ensuring low latency and scalable inference for player interactions at