About this role
Job title: Senior Manager, Software Engineering - VALORANT Platform Engineering
About the Role As a Senior Manager, Software Engineering on the VALORANT Platform Engineering team, you will lead the engineering organization responsible for how VALORANT builds, releases, deploys, and operates its game client, dedicated servers, and live service ecosystem. You’ll partner with Riot and Tencent to evolve a scalable, reliable, and developer-friendly platform and mentor engineers and managers to drive performance and accountability.
What You'll Do
- Lead and grow a distributed organization of engineers and engineering managers across Los Angeles, Seattle, and Sydney
- Define the technical and organizational strategy for VALORANT’s core services, build, release, live operations, and developer infrastructure ecosystem
- Drive improvements to Unreal Engine build pipelines, game microservices pipelines, release orchestration, service environments, load testing, and operational tooling
- Partner with Riot and Tencent engineering teams to improve reliability, release velocity, operational visibility, and developer workflows across regions
- Establish technical direction across build infrastructure, release engineering, service orchestration, observability, and operational excellence practices
- Influence cross-team architecture, engineering standards, and organizational decisions affecting long-term scalability and live service reliability
- Mentor engineering leaders and senior engineers fostering ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experience building or operating large-scale external customer-facing backend systems, game services, or cloud platforms
- 4+ years of engineering management experience leading engineers and engineering managers
- Experience leading organizations responsible for live service infrastructure, release engineering, developer platforms, or operational systems at scale
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, service reliability, deployment workflows, and operational excellence practices
- Experience driving technical strategy and influencing architecture across multiple teams or organizations
- Professional experience with cloud infrastructure and modern backend technologies such as Go, Java, C#, or similar
Nice to Have
- Experience shipping large-scale live games
- Experience with Unreal Engine build, deployment, or development ecosystems
- Leading or modernizing CI/CD, release engineering, or developer infrastructure platforms
- Improving observability, reliability, and operational tooling for service-oriented architectures
- Working within globally distributed engineering organizations
Compensation & Benefits
- Riot focuses on work/life balance with open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules
- Medical, dental, and life insurance; parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children; and a 401k with company match
- Check benefits pages for additional information