Manager, Anti-Cheat Engineering - Central Technology, Anti-Cheat

Riot’s Anti-Cheat team is versatile and passionate about its craft. We understand the player impact of cheating in games and are focused on setting the highest bar for the integrity of multiplayer games. We relish the opportunity to work with low-level systems and take pride in developing creative, rigorous defenses against adversaries. At the most fundamental level, our goal is to promote the best player experience by protecting the legitimacy of their favorite games.

As a Manager, Anti-Cheat Engineering , you will lead the team responsible for the ongoing development and evolution of Vanguard Anti-Cheat’s Windows client services. You’ll set technical direction, shape priorities, and ensure the team delivers secure, reliable capabilities across Vanguard’s Anti-Cheat suite in a timely manner. While your primary focus will be enabling the team and driving outcomes, your strong fluency in cheat communities and techniques will allow you to guide architecture, challenge technical decisions, and step directly into complex debugging or investigations when needed. You’ll help the team anticipate and analyze emerging cheat techniques, then translate those findings into effective detections, mitigations, and preventative controls.

Responsibilities

Manage, identify, recruit, interview, and hire engineers to help the team scale effectively

Set direction and drive high-impact anti-cheat capabilities from ambiguity through production across user-mode, kernel-mode, and obfuscation tooling surfaces

Lead the team in rapidly translating emerging threats into resilient detections and preventative countermeasures that can be safely deployed at scale

Balance immediate threat response with proactive technical investments that anticipate adversaries’ next moves or eliminate common abuse vectors entirely

Guide and participate in complex investigations involving highly evasive cheats and operating-system manipulation techniques

Ensure the team can diagnose and resolve complex compatibility, reliability, and security issues in highly opaque environments, stepping into the details when needed

Build trusted relationships with game teams as internal customers, helping them understand their cheating ecosystems, integrate Anti-Cheat effectively, and make informed tradeoffs across security, player experience, scope, and delivery

Establish clear priorities and technical expectations, helping engineers navigate uncertainty and make sound decisions across security, compatibility, performance, and operational risk

Partner across engineering, product, operations, and game teams to align dependencies, communicate risk, and deliver anti-cheat capabilities successfully across Riot’s portfolio

Required Qualifications

2+ years of experience leading product or developing engineers, either as an Engineering Manager or as a Technical Product Lead

Familiarity with cheat-development or game-security research communities and a practical understanding of modern cheat techniques and anti-cheat evasions

Strong understanding of Anti-Cheat architectures, with the ability to evaluate designs, guide technical discussions, and engage directly when complex problems require it

Experience leading work on low-level, security-sensitive systems and helping teams navigate tradeoffs across security, reliability, compatibility, performance, and delivery

Working knowledge of Windows security model and security feature suite such as Secure Boot, HVCI, and measured boot attestation

Desired Qualifications

Familiarity with reverse-engineering techniques and workflows, including the analysis of packed, protected, or obfuscated binaries, with the judgment to translate technical findings into priorities, investments, and defensive strategy

Working knowledge of the Windows kernel and driver model, sufficient enough to guide architecture, assess technical risk, and oversee the development and operation of production-grade kernel-mode drivers

Working knowledg