Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Job title: Staff Machine Learning Engineer

About the Role As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Riot, you’ll design and scale the infrastructure powering a wide range of ML workloads and evolving AI systems across Riot. You’ll help shape the long-term direction of Riot’s ML platform, applying modern MLOps practices to improve reliability, scalability, and developer experience. The ML Platform team builds and operates the shared infrastructure behind Riot’s AI ecosystem, including model serving, orchestration, feature management, and deployment workflows.

What You'll Do

• Design and operate AI & ML inference infrastructure, including deployment pipelines and CPU/GPU-aware orchestration
• Develop CI/CD workflows that enable rapid iteration and safe promotion from development to production
• Optimize infrastructure supporting varied model architectures, from foundation models to gradient boosted trees, for high throughput, low latency, and high availability
• Establish and evolve ML deployment best practices, including multi-version models, blue/green rollouts, shadow deployments, and rollback strategies
• Improve developer experience by reducing operational complexity and simplifying platform onboarding
• Influence long-term platform architecture and help shape technical direction across Riot’s ML ecosystem
• Collaborate with researchers and game teams to understand product needs and build reusable platform capabilities
• Use modern AI-assisted development tools and workflows thoughtfully to accelerate iteration, while maintaining engineering quality and reliability

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of experience in engineering, with time spent on ML/AI, platform or infrastructure teams
• Experience operating inference platforms such as KServe and production ML infrastructure including Feast, Milvus, or similar open-source systems
• Experience with one or more inference serving frameworks, including NVIDIA Triton/Dynamo, TorchServe, or similar systems
• Familiarity with GPU orchestration, performance tuning, and cost-aware scheduling
• Experience with CI/CD workflows, infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform), and artifact management
• Experience building and operating services within distributed or service-oriented architectures

Nice to Have

• Experience building ML infrastructure within a real-time, or latency-sensitive environment
• Hands-on experience with optimizing ML & AI deployments (LLMs, diffusion models, etc.) for throughput, latency and reliability
• Familiarity with agentic workflows and orchestration frameworks for LLM-based systems
• Passion for player experience, game systems, or creative technology development

Compensation & Benefits

• Our Perks: Riot focuses on work/life balance, open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules
• Benefits include medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match
• Riot emphasizes collaborative teams and a mission-driven culture focused on players