Senior Manager, Software Engineering, Platform Engineering - VALORANT

Riot engineers bring deep knowledge of specific technical areas but also value the opportunity to work in many broader domains. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will gain organizational alignment by building a strong engineering vision and offering creative solutions to organizational design. You’ll also serve as a mentor for a team of engineers and managers, overseeing performance management, growth opportunities, and accountability.

On VALORANT Foundations, we build the platforms, services, and operational systems that enable VALORANT to ship continuously at global scale.

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. This includes the platform and workflows powering Unreal Engine build pipelines, game microservices build pipelines, release orchestration, service environments, load testing, and operational tooling across Riot and Tencent ecosystems globally. As well as ownership of core Player facing game services including provisioning, configuration, and administration.

We’re looking for a leader who understands how large-scale game services and operational ecosystems fit together - and who can help evolve those systems into a more scalable, reliable, and developer-friendly platform for the future of VALORANT. You’ll partner closely with teams across Riot and Tencent to improve release velocity, operational excellence, and service reliability for a globally distributed live game.

This role reports to the Director of Engineering for VALORANT Foundations.

Responsibilities:

• 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 how VALORANT builds, validates, deploys, and operates Unreal game clients, dedicated servers, and backend services globally

• 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 VALORANT’s long-term scalability and live service reliability

• Mentor engineering leaders and senior engineers while fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement

• 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

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience supporting or shipping large-scale live games

• Experience with Unreal Engine build, deployment, or development ecosystems

• Experience leading or modernizing CI/CD, release engineering, or developer infrastructure platforms

• Experience improving observability, reliability, and operational tooling for service-oriented architectures

• Experience working within globally distributed engineering organizations

For this role, youll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes the delight of players. We will be looking at your past studies, experience, and your personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about the experiences of players, this could be the role for you!