Director, Machine Learning Engineering - AI Foundations
Riot Games · Los Angeles, USA
About this role
**The opportunity** Riot is building the capabilities to carry AI and machine learning from promise, through prototype, into reliable production systems. **AI Foundations** helps make that possible by building shared platforms and enabling teams across Riot to deliver meaningful AI-powered outcomes. We’re looking for an **engineering leader** to oversee the **AI Foundations engineering organization**. You’ll be accountable for the group’s technical impact, including organizational health, operational excellence, software and machine learning craft quality, and engineering output. All Engineering Managers in AI Foundations will report into this role. You’ll partner with product and executive leaders to connect Riot’s goals to a clear charter, long-term roadmap, and investment choices—staying technically engaged to guide important decisions, address risks, and create clarity and space for managers and teams to lead execution. --- **Responsibilities** - **Set technical strategy and direction**: Shape AI Foundations’ charter, priorities, and long-term roadmap; translate organizational goals into outcomes; make deliberate investment/trade-off decisions. - **Lead and develop the engineering management organization**: Set expectations, coach managers, uphold a consistent performance bar, and identify/develop future leaders. - **Own the organization’s results**: Be accountable for total output and outcomes across multiple teams; make delivery and risks visible; unblock or accelerate work as needed. - **Build the organization and its capabilities**: Plan staffing and skills, identify gaps, develop role/team proposals, partner with Talent on hiring/onboarding, and drive forecasting and compensation planning. - **Guide technical quality and operational ownership**: Stay engaged across AI/ML, software, data, and agentic systems; ensure reliable, secure, maintainable production systems with evaluation, observability, incident response, and ownership. - **Improve how the organization works**: Create operating mechanisms that improve efficiency, team health, and delivery transparency; address recurring friction and unresolved risks. - **Create leverage across Riot**: Build trusted partnerships; share reusable engineering patterns, platform capabilities, evaluation approaches, and lessons learned. - **Communicate with clarity**: Make decisions and trade-offs legible; surface risks early; provide timely, actionable feedback; resolve difficult conversations with candor and judgment. --- **Required Qualifications** - **12+ years** industry experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, AI, or related fields, including **8+ years** management experience. - Proven ability to coach managers, set expectations, manage performance, develop leaders, and maintain a high engineering bar with accountability for organization-wide outcomes. - Strong record of building, shipping, and operating production software, AI/ML systems, or platforms delivering measurable value. - Strong technical credibility and judgment across software systems and AI/ML to assess architecture, quality, operational health, reliability, scale, security, cost, and user impact. - Ability to turn ambiguous needs into strategy, roadmap, measurable outcomes, and clear priorities; make trade-offs and maintain alignment as plans change. - Experience shaping organizational capacity and capabilities (skills gaps, staffing plans, hiring/investment decisions). - Ability to build
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