Staff Platform Engineer: Internal Tools & Backend Services

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Life insurance

Parental leave

401k with company match

Open PTO

Job summary

Riot Games in Los Angeles is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Vanguard’s Platform Services to design, build, and operate backend platform services and internal tooling used across multiple Riot teams. You’ll own APIs, drive reliability, and mentor engineers while shaping scalable systems in a fast-paced environment.

This role emphasizes collaboration with Anti-Cheat, Security, and Game teams, hands-on coding, and leadership through technical judgment.

Qualifications

• Staff-level backend experience owning platforms and internal tooling.
• Experience with distributed systems and designing scalable APIs.
• Ability to lead critical technical decisions and drive reliability.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Mentoring engineers across levels.
• Live production debugging experience.
• Strong architectural judgment for large ecosystems.
• Familiarity with AI tooling (LLMs/Agentic AI) is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve shared backend platform services across Riot systems.
• Own APIs and service contracts used by multiple teams.
• Lead internal tools and web applications for operations and investigations.
• Identify and reduce systemic risks across the platform.
• Design and operate distributed backend systems with high availability and security.
• Partner in incident response, RCA, and reliability improvements.
• Improve CI/CD, observability, and operational workflows.
• Collaborate with Anti-Cheat, Security, and Game teams as a technical partner.

Skills

Staff-level backend experience

Distributed systems

API design & services

Live production debugging

Architectural judgment

Collaboration & communication

LLMs / Agentic AI awareness

Mentoring engineers

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Golang

React

Node.js

TypeScript

Job description

Riot Games in Los Angeles is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Vanguard’s Platform Services to design, build, and operate backend platform services and internal tooling used across multiple Riot teams. You’ll own APIs, drive reliability, and mentor engineers while shaping scalable systems in a fast-paced environment.

This role emphasizes collaboration with Anti-Cheat, Security, and Game teams, hands-on coding, and leadership through technical judgment.