Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Unpublished R&D Product

About the Role

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer on an unpublished R&D game project, you will own the strategy, design, and implementation of ML capabilities. You will work closely with developers, designers, and data scientists to understand their needs, and will be hands-on in conceptualizing, planning, implementing, and maintaining ML-driven solutions. You will report to the Engineering Manager within the R&D game project.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with developers, designers, and data scientists to identify and define improvement opportunities
• Refine modeling and feature strategy for using techniques such as reinforcement learning
• Establish pipeline architecture patterns in partnership with central teams; build reusable training and evaluation pipelines that can be adapted to Riot-wide use cases
• Drive the application of ML/RL systems to improve decision-making and adaptation
• Establish research-to-production practices; balance cutting-edge techniques with production reliability
• Establish evaluation practices in partnership with data scientists and analytics partners; guide experiment design for measuring model impact and set technical evaluation standards
• Define reliability standards in partnership with design and engineering
• Advance and strengthen engineering best practices, including code quality, automated testing, and maintainable architecture
• Mentor engineers and partner disciplines through documentation, reviews, and technical design guidance
• Identify technical risks and bottlenecks, proposing pragmatic solutions to keep projects moving forward

Qualifications

Required

• 6+ years of experience delivering ML systems in production, including 3+ years in applied modeling or ML research roles, ideally within real-time or interactive environments
• Experience with reinforcement learning, including applying RL to practical production problems
• Experience in production environments with interacting models, feedback loops, or systems where model behavior has downstream consequences beyond a single prediction
• Proficiency with modern ML/data science libraries and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, pandas, etc.
• Experience collaborating regularly with teammates across multiple disciplines
• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Proficiency in Python or similar programming languages

Desired

• Experience with multi-agent reinforcement learning
• Experience in developer tooling
• Experience implementing framework-level UI systems
• Experience in infrastructure and MLOps, such as ML cloud services, containers, and model telemetry
• Experience working in a AAA game engine (e.g., Unity, Unreal)
• Proficiency in C++