Principal Software Engineer - Developer Connections, Game Release

Responsibilities

• Define Technical Direction: Shape and execute the strategy for Riot’s centralized game release capabilities, balancing speed, safety, and scale.
• Partner with Game Teams: Work directly with game teams to understand real-world release constraints and ensure centralized solutions directly address production needs.
• Build Cross-Team Alignment: Communicate technical vision clearly, establish trust, and help partners evaluate the value and tradeoffs of centralized release systems.
• Guide End-to-End Architecture: Lead architectural strategy across complex surfaces, including clients, game servers, backend services, content, configuration, and publishing workflows.
• Drive Reliable Release Decisions: Champion cross-team technical decisions that maximize release predictability and safety without sacrificing game team velocity.
• Apply Strong Technical & Product Judgment: Navigate ambiguous release challenges by balancing player impact, workflow efficiency, platform constraints, and time-to-market.
• Advise Leadership: Serve as a trusted technical sounding board, linking engineering strategy and technical investments directly to partner adoption.
• Raise Engineering Standards: Elevate technical design, system architecture, operational rigor, and cross-functional collaboration across the domain.
• Resolve High-Impact Issues: Hands-on diagnose complex technical blockers, build context quickly, and partner directly with engineers to drive solutions through to production.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of developing and shipping at least one live-operated game.
• Broad domain expertise in the end-to-end game shipping lifecycle, including production workflows, platform constraints, and live operations challenges.
• Broad release surface experience across game clients, game servers, backend services, configuration, content pipelines, or release orchestration.
• Holistic technical perspective, with a proven ability to connect architectural decisions directly to player experience and operational stability.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills, with recent experience designing, building, debugging, and maintaining large-scale production systems.
• Proven crisis response & problem-solving ability, adept at stepping into unfamiliar, high-pressure technical situations to diagnose root causes and unblock delivery.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience in release engineering, deployment systems, publishing systems, or live game operations.
• Experience shipping games across multiple platforms or regions.
• Experience designing or evolving shared technical capabilities used by multiple game teams.
• Experience serving as a senior technical partner in product or platform strategy discussions.
• Experience helping organizations move from bespoke workflows toward scalable common patterns.
• Experience in a central platform or developer infrastructure team supporting game teams.
• Strong technical leadership experience in ambiguous, cross-team problem spaces, with a track record of successfully delivering impactful results.
• Proven ability to define technical direction and influence adoption beyond their immediate team.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to build trust and alignment with game teams and senior technical partners.