Staff Platform Engineer - Backend & Internal Tools

Riot Games; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 193,000 - 269,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open PTO

Medical, dental, and life insurance

Parental leave

401k with company match

Job summary

Riot Games in Los Angeles is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on Vanguard’s Platform Services to design, build, and operate backend platform services powering our Vanguard stack. You will own APIs, lead internal tooling development, and partner with Anti-Cheat, Security, and Game teams to improve scalability and reliability.

You will work across client, services, and internal tooling while mentoring engineers and influencing architectural decisions in a fast-paced, player-focused environment.

Qualifications

• Staff-level experience building and owning backend platforms and internal tools
• Experience with backend service development and distributed systems (e.g., AWS, Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience building internal tools or web applications using modern web stacks (Golang, React, Node.js, TypeScript)
• Experience designing and maintaining APIs and shared services in a large or growing ecosystem
• Comfort operating and debugging live, production systems
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to influence key technical decisions
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve shared backend platform services that power Vanguard systems across client, services, and internal tooling
• Own APIs and service contracts used by multiple teams, ensuring reliability, clarity, and long-term maintainability
• Lead the development of internal tools and web applications used for operations, investigations, configuration, and visibility
• Identify and reduce systemic risks across the platform (scalability, operability, security, maintainability)
• Design and operate distributed backend systems with high availability and strong security guarantees
• Partner in incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, observability, and operational workflows for platform services
• Collaborate across Anti-Cheating, Security, and Game teams as a trusted technical partner

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Communication skills

Collaborative mindset

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Golang

React

Node.js

TypeScript

Job description

Riot Games in Los Angeles is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on Vanguard’s Platform Services to design, build, and operate backend platform services powering our Vanguard stack. You will own APIs, lead internal tooling development, and partner with Anti-Cheat, Security, and Game teams to improve scalability and reliability.

You will work across client, services, and internal tooling while mentoring engineers and influencing architectural decisions in a fast-paced, player-focused environment.