Staff Software Engineer (Platform Services, Central Technology, Anti-Cheat)

• As a Staff Software Engineer on Vanguard’s Platform Services team, you will operate at the intersection of platform services, internal developer tooling, and ecosystem design
• You’ll be responsible for supporting a platform that serves millions of players, supporting internal tools that serve hundreds of Player Support agents and developing cutting edge technology to help prevent, detect and deter cheaters from getting into our games
• You will help lead through technical expertise and soft skills, influencing the direction of the team both through code and a deep drive to understand and improve the product
• You will partner closely with engineers, stakeholders, and anti-cheat experts across the entire Vanguard stack to build performant and impactful tools and services in support of our Players
• You will report to the Engineering Manager of Platform Services within Anti-Cheat
• Design, build, and evolve shared backend platform services that power Vanguard systems across client, services, and internal tooling
• Own APIs and service contracts used by multiple teams, ensuring reliability, clarity, and long-term maintainability
• Lead the development of internal tools and web applications used for operations, investigations, configuration, and visibility
• Identify and reduce systemic risks across the platform (scalability, operability, security, maintainability)
• Design and operate distributed backend systems with high availability and strong security guarantees
• Partner in incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements
• Improve CI/CD pipelines, observability, and operational workflows for platform services
• Collaborate across Anti-Cheat, Security, and Game teams as a trusted technical partner

Benefits

• Healthcare: Medical, dental, and vision plans that cover you as well as your spouse/domestic partner and children.
• Family Care: Life insurance, parental leave, plus short and long-term disability.
• Open Paid Time Off: In addition to holidays, a 2-week end of year break, and a 1-week mid-year break, Rioters are trusted to take the time they need throughout the year.
• Retirement: Riot matches retirement contributions so you can continue to play games long after you retire.
• Play Fund: Riot’s annual play fund allows Rioters to broaden their knowledge of the games that matter to players and the community.
• Donation Matching: Riot matches donations of time and money to nonprofits to double down on support.

• Strong architectural judgment and experience influencing key technical decisions
• Comfort operating and debugging live, production systems
• Experience designing and maintaining APIs and shared services in a large or growing ecosystem
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset
• Significant experience building internal tools or web applications using modern web stacks (e.g.,Golang, React, Node.js, TypeScript)
• Staff-level experience building and owning backend platforms and internal tools used by multiple teams
• Experience working on platform teams or internal developer tooling
• Experience designing systems with security and adversarial thinking in mind
• Background supporting high-availability services or operational tooling
• Experience mentoring engineers at all levels
• Experience building developer platforms or sandbox environments for rapid experimentation
• A strong understanding of LLMs, Agentic AI based development, and their respective strengths and weaknesses
• Strong experience with backend service development and distributed systems (e.g., AWS, Docker, Kubernetes)
• This is a hands-on staff role for an engineer who thrives on rolling up their sleeves and building services in a fast-paced and innovative environment