About the Job
Riot Engineers on Anti-Cheat are builders, trailblazers, and stewards of competitive integrity. We protect the legitimacy of Riot’s multiplayer games by designing resilient platforms, developing robust internal tools, and staying ahead of adversarial threats without losing sight of the player experience.
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 Supp...
Key Responsibilities
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
Required Skills & Abilities
Staff-level experience building and owning backend platforms and internal tools used by multiple teams
Strong experience with backend service development and distributed systems
(e.g., AWS, Docker, Kubernetes)
Significant experience building internal tools or web applications using modern web stacks (e.g.,Golang, React, Node.js, TypeScript)
Experience designing and maintaining APIs and shared services in a large or growing ecosystem
Comfort operating and debugging live, production systems
Strong architectural judgment and experience influencing key technical decisions
Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset
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
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!
