Staff Software Engineer, Tools (Full-Stack) - Central Creative

Riot engineers bring deep knowledge of specific technical areas but also value the opportunity to work in a variety of broader domains. As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll drive important technical initiatives and provide other engineers with a clear illustration of extraordinary engineering. We work with both new and current technology, creating innovative solutions to overcome high-volume obstacles and to deliver player value.

As a Staff Software Engineer (Full-Stack) on the Central Creative Tools team, you will work closely with artists, discipline leads, and other engineers to gather requirements and implement the long-term vision for the team’s tooling. In this role you will be hands-on in conceptualizing, planning, implementing, and maintaining the tools that power content creation workflows utilizing Digital Asset Management (DAM) to make creatives more efficient. You will report to the Director of Technical Art on the team.

Responsibilities:

Implement the foundational elements of the studio’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to support each game team’s creative tools ecosystem

Be hands-on in development, writing excellent code that sets a high standard for other engineers.

Evaluate, integrate, and operate AI-assisted engineering tools that improve code quality, reliability, security, performance, and developer productivity across the software delivery lifecycle

Lead the technical execution of multi-month to year-plus work efforts across the business unit, holding teams to established standards.

Help teams navigate ambiguity and complexity by breaking down problems, identifying risks, and clearly communicating trade-offs.

Implement the technical vision, architecture, and execution for the tools engineering team in accordance with overall goals of team leadership.

Collaborate effectively with production, design, art, and other engineering teams to deliver tools that are purpose-driven, robust, and scalable

Champion tooling best practices across multiple teams including design, tech art, UX, and gameplay engineering

Review and identify new and shared developer tooling technologies, both internal and external, as possible opportunities for the team

Provide documentation and trainings on new tools and workflows to internal customers

Partner with game developers, infrastructure engineers, and QA teams to align release processes with development needs.

Required Qualifications:

6+ years of professional experience in software engineering, including experience delivering live or shipped products at scale

Experience supporting AI/ML platforms, inference services, model-serving systems, data pipelines, or GPU-backed workloads

3+ years working on game development tools

Experience in Unreal Engine and awareness of upcoming tools from Epic

B.S. in computer science or equivalent experience

Proven ability to navigate ambiguity and influence cross-functional stakeholders

Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences

Knowledge within a diverse set of public cloud technologies: AWS RDS, S3, EC2, etc.

Proficiency in GoLang, C++ and C#, and familiarity with Java / Typescript.

Experience working with large game teams and large code bases

Experience collaborating with teammates across multiple disciplines

Desired Qualifications:

Experience working in Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems

Experience of working with desktop applications

Professional experience creating tools in Unreal 5

Experience collaborating with teammates across multiple disciplines

Product sense, pragmatism, and player empathy in making tech decisions

For this role, you'll 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 players' experiences, this could be your role!