[2020] We work at Riot Games, and we've got jobs you've (probably!) never heard of. Ask Us Anything!

The whole idea behind this thread is that there are way more types of jobs in the games industry than you might've realized, and so if you're interested in one day working at Riot or at a place like Riot, feel free to ask the folks listed above about their experiences! Tagging the person you'd like to hear from will help them find your question.

yeah, im just dumb

/u/RiotAryeila
As the official Queen of Puns and Grammar at Riot Games, how does it feel to have a platform to share your love of the highest form of humor with the masses?
In the same vein, which pun are you the most proud of? Alternatively, which Champion Spotlight video has the most puns that you're proud of?
Also, what do you actually do? I know we're on the same team, but I don't understand big tech words. Help me dumb.

My favorite thing is working on behind-the-scenes projects that take a long time to make and potentially have a big impact (like L10 aka The League 10 Year Anniversary). Those are typically big team projects, so the downside of that is potentially months of meetings, planning, bureaucratic navigation of org structures, etc. So the most meaningful and satisfying work I've ever gotten to do has also been the most painful.

/u/RiotWolfPack
You're in the afternoon session! I will ask you appropriately softball questions at your allotted time!!!!!! Also, let's get coffee soon.

not valuable enough to ever stop getting memed on lul

this message was threatening even without the questionable spelling of "mail"

tagging u/draggles so he can apologize personally

not TOO much because he's actually a very nice guy

Heya - i'm not technically part of this AMA but we don't have any news to share right now. your best bet is to follow our twitter account @wildrift to be the first to know when we do have new updates!

Did you know that our first interaction was during my writing test when you highlighted my em dash and freaked out?

What I'm saying is that I'm upset you used the evil -- in your response instead of the far superior — . Please respond.

what's that?

u/Isomalt whats your favorite dinner you have ever eaten?

Recently, we've discovered that actually that's NOT enough. I know, we were shocked too.

I recall a moment when we were triaging a bug that was deep within some very very old code. The engineer was frustrated and making some verbal comments about the quality of the code, things like "why would they have done it this way?", "who reviewed this?", "it doesn't make any sense"

After the process of triage and analysis was complete, the engineer decided to scroll up to the top of the file to see who written this bit of code we had been wrestling with.....yeah it was them.

I've decided to change git blame to git toast just so when this happens to me I don't feel so bad

/u/RiotSafeandSecure

if i, hypothetically, wanted to get started in lifting, what do

please remember that i have the upper body strength of spongebob.

Actually legit question, so I'll answer as best I can:

The first thing a recruiter looks for is evidence of credibility. This can be work history at another company, or education credentials, or especially shipped projects. Without one of these three things, it's hard for a recruiter to know whether to take you seriously as a candidate. So if you can't get a job in the field that'll earn you relevant experience, do—and FINISH–a project on your own, and seek an education that'll give you relevant credentials.

Before I joined Riot as a writer, I spent years grinding as a freelance writer, working my way up the ladder in the games media by shipping lots of articles for different websites and magazines. After like six or seven years of that, I had enough experience to consider applying to a place like Riot.

Your experience/mileage may vary, but the best advice I could possibly give would be to get started on shipping projects now, even if it's small and doesn't pay well or at all.

Also, you do kinda LOOK like spongebob.

https://media.tenor.com/images/b36a6bcdfad10b7c57c768f0b7151ccc/tenor.png

I'll take you up on that when I'm next there!

I exists in our hearts. Idk if it exists in reality anymore.

i think it's 7

also MASTERS OF DOOM is one of the best books ever written about a video game company

dm me, i can connect you

6 months ago aredherring is the enemy of present day aredherring

I'm not one of the Rioters giving the AMA here, but I'd just like to say that I joined Riot in my mid 20s. You can do it too!

That pokemon thing you just mentioned is NOT lame. It's exactly the sort of thing that a good games company will perk up and pay attention to. Get better at your craft, ship projects with lots of love in them, and be realistic about the level of roles you're applying for. You can go far.

oh yeah that's the one with all the funny characters and the lady who says "WELCOME TO SUMMONERS RIFT" yeah it's tight

BIG

FAMILYFRIENDLY

SWORD

:(

but i need my daily morning flat white

All of us want to work with other people who are passionate about the work! That's why personal projects like that DO matter.

Bless you too!

the League 10 Year Anniversary :) I'll edit it to be more clear

my boy maple was a product manager, and i'm more on the marketing communications side of things. i feel pretty good about the type of work I get to do for Riot, so whatever the future holds for me i'm pretty sure it'll still be in that marketing/comms niche

A bunch of us will be hopping off now: wave 2 of responses coming starting around 2:30pm PT! (Two hours from now)

There are tons of super valuable people at Riot that players never hear about. If I had to nominate JUST ONE I would mention a person named Megan P. (she knows who she is). She is basically a producer and organizational machine who works behind the scenes to make events like the League 10 Year Anniversary happen. She's a complete beast and I think a lot of cool stuff that players love is secretly dependent on her continuing to be a beast.

I can answer your second question, I work on LoR's CI/CD system. Our build pipeline does a lot of clever tricks to reuse stuff that hasn't changed. As a result, build times vary depending on how much stuff you've changed. Typical time from pushing a commit to being able to test it on a local patchline varies between 40 minutes to 80 minutes, including building everything, running a bunch of automated tests, and deploys.

LoR release engineer here :) on Fridays at 5 pm we have a slack reminder that says:

PLZ DO NOT MERGE INTO MASTER
ITS AFTER 5 ON FRIDAY
PLZ DONT DO IT
ITS NOT WORTH

Yes, your account will be checked for toxicity, but if it was a long time ago or something minor, you are probably fine.

I would not encourage lying in order to start working at Riot. :)

Languages I've seen in use at Riot: C++, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, Groovy, Go, and a bunch more. So yeah, we need people with experience in all sorts of different languages :)

what about DNS blips?

I was temporarily banned for 2 weeks back in Season 2; I joined Riot in Season 6. It raised eyebrows, but it was pretty clear I had reformed since then.

Riot is not unreasonable and will take context into account. If it's clear it was a mistake on the system, then you have nothing to be worried about.

since the SJW's of the world will probably not want to hire me lol

I definitely would recommend dropping the use of the term 'SJW'. It's almost always used as a slur/pejorative and will not reflect well on you

I can answer part of this question. On LoR we have extensive test automation. There are unit tests that run using xunit, functional tests that run using pytest, load tests that use locust, and more. They all run in Jenkins and use a bunch of off-the-shelf tech like ADB, docker, various python and dotnet libraries, etc. Besides all the automation, there's a ton of manual testing, but I can't really speak to the details of the manual testing.

yeah, +20 to pen testing

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/down-rabbit-hole-performance-monitoring I think this is relevant to your interests :)

It's difficult for me to respond to your comment without potentially ending up in some journalists soundbite.

But I feel that being questioned on my 2-week ban was perfectly fair - It takes a lot to get banned for a time period like that. You do not get a 2 week ban on your first offense. It's not like I was perfectly squeaky clean when I joined, either - I was in low diamond, after all - but I hadn't received a formal punishment in 4 years.

What's a good way to get back in touch with them otherwise?

You are more than welcome to attempt to apply to the job posting again. I would, respectfully, recommend you have some introspection on the way that you come across in text. There are things you mentioned in both of your comments that raise a few flags for me, personally.

if your goal is breadsticks, yes, if your goal is a second date, no

u/Eneopa hi

Yes, I work in the application security team. We're actually hiring for a Senior Application Security engineer in Dublin right now! https://riotgames.com/careers

In general the appsec role is a wider than just penetration testing, though

Group 2 starts now! Now featuring 100% more localization tech experts, internal tools developers, and ex-Starcraft-pro Lawyers

look,

Hi u/ravenhusky!

Firstly congratulations on finding a career pathway that excites you! Honestly, all sorts of roles open up time-to-time, so closer to the degree ending time check out our careers website and potentially there will be a great fit at that time.

I'm working more in the area related to strategic finance, or in other words finance on products to help ensure that we're running responsibly. There are also corporate level teams that focus on accounting, tax, treasury, purchasing, procurement, fin-ops, ... you know the whole line of finance roles. So the day in the life will be pretty different.

Strategic finance on League is about partnering with teams to help make sure they are making great decisions. Let's say that we're working with a vendor to help us with some cinematics, for example: do we have a contract, and the other stuff in place. There's also other types of support relating to the strategic planning and forecasting cycles, etc. We do this stuff in a very fluid and player focused way.

/u/RiotMobility can answer the tax question probably. I just know it doesn't show up in my taxes in the end of the year.

Hello! We host internships every year. The positions available differ annually, but they're usually posted here.

The positions generally get listed in July/August/September for the following year and close a few months later.

The UX team sometimes posts on Medium about the process and what it's like to work at Riot.

Hi /u/olasbondolas, thanks for asking. Economic sustainability philosophy stuff was written about in this article... it covers a lot of the bases.

But, my quick response here is that we think about our revenue as a second-order impact of satisfied players, who have things that they are happy to purchase. If we have a healthy game with happy players and if we understand what those players need the revenue is going to be great. We're involved in the entire process from conception through to assessment of whether we need to change products, etc.

/u/mombawamba It depends on how little your interest in statistics is! I find that our analytics and data scientists are pretty statistically savvy, even the folks with a physics or math background. (I've heard them say a similar line).

There are definitely roles for people with your background, look at analytics jobs. It's likely to have SQL, python, requirements.

I joined from a non-gaming background, so keep looking!

It's all good at bilgewater, I'm a massive coffee afficionado and they make some great espresso. Caffeine somehow has no impact on me, I enjoy the flavor and experience.

There are many backgrounds into Riot, and it depends on the career and leveling--keep an eye out for finance and also analytics roles. Generally speaking my advice is to just do the best you can in your degree and in your work: get great grades, be involved in clubs, network and get to know people.

Before Riot I worked at McKinsey & Company, a consultancy that works for challenging projects for businesses and government. I had been there for about 5 years, and figured that I wanted to pursue my lifelong passion for games. I'm grateful that Riot is the type of company that values broader experience, not just games industry experiences...

Hi /u/JA_JA_SCHNITZEL love the questions. Thanks for following it.

We look at revenue-related metrics for sure these are a part of our strategic plan and an important part to managing our operations. But it is not the reason why we exist or our central focus: instead we might focus on numbers of players, player satisfaction, League's new player retention, game hour per account trends, etc. In short the types of metrics that help us to understand player health.

Regarding markets, we're aiming to be the most player focused game company around, and that means for players globally. During our 10th year anniversary we announced that we're adding support for Arabic, for example. League's already a very global game. Apart from geography, I think some of our future titles are aiming to serve the needs of different groups of players outside of the ones we aim to serve with League. I'm excited about many of those games, even if I am focused on League, TFT and Wild Rift personally.

There is seasonality; the way to think about it is that if players are playing revenue is higher. The variability of cash flow impact in that regard is handled more by treasury rather than the game teams, it's not really our major concern: we are much more long-term focused.

Follow that dream, and I wish you success.

I can answer the data question: we're looking for knowledge of statistics and logical thinking, SQL, Python if you're an analyst. Data engineering is more Java, data modelling, computer science. Check the career website for more details. Apart from technical skill, analysts are embedded on product teams, and I like to tell my organization "you are game developers first, and second"--or in other words, you exist to make the game of League of Legends better for players, not to make cool decks or fancy spreadsheets.

Depending on what sort of operations... certain types of operations might be more aligned with the "Dev. manager" roles...

I think that people who are committed to great work increase their chances. Get a repo on github, share your projects and models. Solve interesting problems, and basically have fun building models and discovering things.

In terms of how you do what I'm doing today, I spend a lot of my time managing the managers of the people who are doing the core craft work. Management is a completely different skill to doing craft, and I think it's never too early to start thinking about how to help people grow and advance in their careers, but it requires you to also understand their craft.

We think about business unit (mostly game) and corporate (company) strategy, or corporate development (like m&a, etc.). We occasionally have internships, keep an eye out.

I think there are many backgrounds, mine was from a management consultancy, but some might come from a corporate strategy team or investment banking, etc. There are a lot of different paths.

I love operations, I had a tonne of enjoyment working on operational efficiency projects in a past set of work experiences.

Depending on what set of skills you have it might apply more to a "dev manager" role--assuming you've got some agile/lean background.

Yes, we also want League to grow and I'm glad you share our goal. Most of League's most successful growth comes from players telling their friends!

We think a lot about how to encourage interest in the right types of players and in a way which is cost effective too. Over time we are experimenting with different channels. Some channels create a lot of interest, but with players that might not actually want to play League... I think the esports might see us become more and more mainstream, and when K/DA came out the overall interest was much broader than League players.

Hey, and one great bit of news: League is continuing to grow, it's a great time to be playing.

I encourage people to do their best in their grades and to be showing impact and leadership. Aim high and get the best job you can, and that is great for you until you land your dream role in the industry.

My background before Riot was at McKinsey, and I work with colleagues who were at one of the big-4s... so work hard, learn as much as you can and keep your focus on delivering value for your clients!

There is an internship program but it doesn't always have all the roles, also keep an eye out for the "associate" or "entry" level roles. I can't answer anything specific here, but check our careers site is my best advice.

I studied computer science in undergrad and an MBA later on. I work across actual financials: revenues and costs, economic profit, telemetry and research findings, etc. I am more focused on the recommendation and I think about the right tool for the job.

Keep an eye out for roles, I think there are definitely roles for people with a solid accounting background. Careers website might list them all.

My hiring decision was based on my professional qualifications for the role, and today when I make hiring decisions that's my only factor. The exception would be for certain jobs where there is a specific business need for gameplay knowledge (such as the "balance team"). Of course, most people are highly passionate gamers at Riot.

I worked at McKinsey so I can speak directly to that!

I loved working at the firm--ultimately I was tired of travel and realized that if I didn't try to follow my childhood dream of making games I'd probably look back and regret it.

Consulting is great: a lot of difficult and varied challenges, but high-pressure environment which I really learned a lot from. There's a lot of variance in the work: I worked in strategy, operations, marketing, sales, insurance, banking, mining, logistics, grocery, retail, high tech.

... but here's the thing: making video games is so much more meaningful to me. It's as cross-functional, but it's in an industry that I fundamentally enjoy. The hours are more sustainable, and there is no required travel (in my role).

I wasn't in the industry. I've answered this more in other questions and I'm running out of time today! Thanks for asking the question, and good luck in following the dream.

The answer is always "it depends", but yeah there are people with math backgrounds here for sure!

I don't have an answer for you specifically for IT, but I was one of the two people on my team who handled the internship program for Application Security in 2017; I have some general advice for you.

The very first thing to do is to make your application stick out. For the internship position, we were interviewing for we had roughly 200 applicants.

About 100 of those were clearly not applying for an internship (i.e they were just sending their CV to every open inbox they could), so we threw those out.

About 20 of the remainder had clearly taken the effort to tailor their application to Riot but were unfortunately not looking to apply for the application security position so much as they wanted to work at Riot, which is admirable, but we really needed an application security engineer intern.

The remaining 80 were a bit harder. Of the 80, we had to remove any that would require a visa to work in Ireland as it's complicated to get a work visa for internships. After that, we were down to about 50. Anyone who didn't have a cover letter or had a cover letter that didn't actually mention the fact that they were applying for a tech job was discarded, too - We figured that if you didn't include those then you weren't really paying attention to what you were applying for.

This left us with about 20 promising applicants. We phone interviewed all of those applicants for their culture and tech fit. We had to narrow this 20 down to 3, and those 3 would come on-site for an on-site interview gauntlet. The main thing that distinguished the top 3 from the others were their subject matter expertise, perceived culture fit and willingness to learn.

We valued culture fit higher than technical knowledge - Ultimately, if you're an intern, we're more interested in your ability to be pleasant to work with and will mentor you to get you to where you need to be technically, but it's much harder to take someone who is very solid technically and make them a culture fit.

The most important tip I can give you: Add a cover letter. Your cover letter is what sets you apart from other applicants, particularly as an intern, where you likely have very little if any relevant experience in the field you want to work in and most every other applicant is going to be studying the same stuff as you. One trap individuals fall into is feeling like they have to gush in their CL about how much they love League - it's really great if you do, but it's not what we expect. What we're looking to get out of your cover letter is a sense of why you want to work for Riot and how you will be to work with. In short, the CV is how you tell us what you've done but the CL is how you tell us who you are, and as you can imagine, for interns your personality is more important than technical knowledge so to speak.

Oh, and tip number 2: Fancy CVs (games and such) are cool, but I would not recommend them for an internship position. You get a lot of applications for an internship and if lots of them are time-consuming to read it doesn't help you proportionate to the time you will invest making the game.

Making games is a fascinating blend of technical, design, creative, business, product, marketing and other fields all at once. I have a computer science background and so I enjoy learning about the technical, but even if I didn't the engineers would help me to understand. I think having a holistic viewpoint is essential. I think fostering an inclusive viewpoint for all disciplines is critical too. I manage managers today and occasionally code in SQL or python or what have you. But it really shouldn't be what I spend my time on. I'd be the worst one at that and it's not gonna be what the team needs from me (even if I miss that part of the job).

I have many favorite champs and mostly play top-lane. Garen is always rewarding to play.

Those sorts of jobs tend to be managed through contracting orgs, which makes it complicated. I would absolutely LOVE to get folks like our custodians in a Reddit AMA one day. Would be tons of fun.

There is this pretty pervasive view that "mobas" are on a downward trend, but League is not on a downward trend, I honestly feel like we are still growing... Just not meteorically like in the early years. I just also think that given how people play League that it's going to be around for a long time.

My hope is that we continue to serve our players so that you all still find League a great use of your gaming hours!

I think we are making other games because we know y'all enjoy many games and we would like to see if we can bring League's approach to the player to other genres.

1) This is a great question. At Riot the easiest way to make something happen is honestly to show how the players are experiencing the product and how we can improve that experience. I love TFT and I also believe that the mobile product is fantastic, but I tend to disregard my own personal tastes and beliefs and try to understand what our players want. (And TFT mobile is what many want) This is when the conversation becomes nuanced. Players want many things. Sometimes some players want some things and others want the opposite. There are opportunity costs. Tech challenges. Dependencies. And the heart of influence becomes in listening, understanding and making sometimes incredibly difficult trade-offs. It's exhilarating and hard. We don't always get it right. But we are always trying.

2) Yes, reach out. I'll be happy to come.

I’m texting u/dzareth rn telling him to get back on because these are actually cool questions.

While I’m here, on 2) I think it depends on longevity of support—premium-priced games that turn into long-supported games may very well merit some sort of ongoing monetization. These can be ethically done, if you’re smart. The decision to go FTP or “premium” priced should mostly be determined by how niche you think your game is. Niche market games should probably charge an entry fee, at least in today’s market

On 4) I personally think LoL 2 should never happen. Ongoing support and “Ship of Theseus” style replacement of the parts seems more player focused. That said, definitely bookmark this post so you can come back and call me a liar if we release League 2 ten years from now

God bless, and good luck with your MBA!

Hey! Thanks for asking. These are solid questions. These are exactly the type of things we discuss at work.

1) Dynamic pricing. From a microeconomics perspective it is certainly very efficient at getting at the "willingness to pay" of the individual players, and given some of these games have a limited lifespan without these revenue models their financial viability might be significantly challenged. However, these models also over time can undermine players sense of trust and fairness. "Why did I pay x for that when that player paid x/2?" On League we discuss about our goals for players to be happy about their experience with monetization before, during and after, and without creating issues for people who don't or can't monetize. Monetization has to suit the product that you are developing, I personally think that predatory monetization practices can be very effective at driving money in the short term, but not the long term. I am personally attracted to the long term perspective. Players are smart, they have excellent choices of wonderful games to play, and aren't dollar signs on a balance sheet.

2) I think it depends. There are great applications that are great value and everyone wins, and other approaches that are predatory or poor value. As a general rule, at Riot we want players to feel great before, during and after. We don't want purchase regret. But monetization and making games is very challenging. For example, Witcher 3 had two DLC expansions--which I think most people would agree are very fair purchases. And then there are the heavily memed "horse armors". I think so much of these decisions are different and contextual based on geography too. There is a lot that goes into it, making games is difficult, hit-driven, risky and expensive. There is definitely a balance to get right. I think the critical factor is whether the company is treating the player with respect.

3) I will leave this one as private business information. I will say that I think that it was very player focussed.

4) I think we are way past League 2 by now... Perhaps you could argue that a rebranding and relaunching of League might make it appeal to new audiences or drive freshness? But it would probably be very expensive way to do it. I don't think that's the way our audience discovers and enjoys League. That said, I've seen a few attempts to do that in our industry with varying degrees of "truth" behind the marketing of that change. As above, I think players know what is going on. If there is merit they try it, if there isn't they won't. If there is merit, then was the marketing of "2" actually really necessary? So, I am fairly skeptical of that approach, I haven't seen the evidence of it paying off. Perhaps there are circumstances where it would.

5) Depends on the job. We post pretty clear requirements of "required" and "desired" experience. I tend to weight toward academics for more junior candidates and toward experience for more senior candidates. I encourage people to learn a lot on the job, particularly with Analytics many of our team members have picked up SQL and Python on the job. These days though, candidates come to Riot with those skills by default and maybe pick up something else. And the cycle continues.

Haha. Yeah. Sorry I didn't see it during the time. I got through a bunch.

Hey! Good luck with the degree! I enjoyed mine a lot even if I enjoy memeing about MBAs! My advice: Take every technical class you can and care about your grades. Futures and Options? Hell yes!

I think it's been a constant challenge to think about getting that balance right.

To let you in on a secret of how I have changed my thinking is that I remembered that we are a "player focussed" game company and not a "champion focused" game company. Our champions are great. I love our IP. Don't tell anyone though, but they are not real. And they are certainly not our audience or players. So, given that I stopped thinking about giving "champions" skins, I think about us giving players skins. And while I wish every player could have everything they wanted, there are only so many developer hours. The lowest play-rate champions have very, very few "I only play this champion" mains. Most players play a few champs. So most players have something for themselves even if they wish they had one for their champion. The second insight is that we are going to lose economic profit on those weaker champions, but it is the only way we can show those players we care about them. We take that hit. We love those players. So we don't measure those skins the same way, we focus on whether they are actually making that small but wonderful group of players happy.

Yes!

Yes, we have MLE types, Date Engineers, Data scientists.

Your shop is powered by ML, for example.

Yes. There are. Joe talked about this in Riot Pls: https://youtu.be/ADUMS8oZQkE

Nah, the code I write now is perfect. The guy I was 6 months ago was an idiot and the guy I will be in 6 months is a bit of an arsehole

Ah I didn't take that long :P

almost always OP. players take a long time to learn how to play champs. Yuumi started at 29% winrate day 1, and that was at a tuning that we were certain was actually super op (we est 56+% winrate resting if we just let her coast without changes). Course 29% is still too low for her to be a reasonable pick so we have to buff her (and then spent the next year nerfing her as players got better)

Its not fair to anyone playing if theres a 29% winrate champ in the game, even if that champ is actually long term at a reasonable power level

this is further confounded by the fact that higher elo players also just play the game more and learn these new champs faster. LS was telling me about how he "only" had like 70 games on sett the patch he was released, and i'm just thinking "yeah the average sett player is probably on like, game 2 - and it'll take them 6 months before they have the same amount of experience learning the champ as you do right now"

Yes! We have many people in LA! I think it looks like Hong Kong office is looking for people too!

Question for u/CloakOfTheBat: what’s your favorite type of contract to work on and why is it commercial coventure agreements with your pal Kushnood?

I miss them too :(

Hey!

Glad to hear you're interested in working for Riot. It was my dream goal to work here too so I totally feel you on that.

For your major, do you know what you want to do in games? Or do you just want to work in games, doing whatever? (Both are legit but certain roles require certain levels of education/experience and have different skillsets.)

Having a big interaction isn't required to work in games and it could help depending on the role. Most roles though probably won't see it as a huge hiring decision. :)

Yu I’m famous now!!! Appreciate the shout u/the_may0r. We’re lucky to work with a great group of people who really love our sport and enjoy our work. Makes for a great atmosphere.

Our repo is gigantic (tens of gigs) so we mostly use persistent build nodes with persistent workspaces with a ton of locally cached data. We do also cache a lot of stuff in artifact repos (such as Artifactory) and download/reuse as much as possible. We've also been using our internal patcher tech (described in https://technology.riotgames.com/news/supercharging-data-delivery-new-league-patcher) as internal artifact storage/caching more and more, such as for caching Unity's Library folder. Part of how all this works is that at the start of each build, after syncing source code, we hash all the files in the repo to determine what has changed and what needs to be rebuilt. Our artifacts all get tagged with hashes when they're uploaded.