Principal Data Engineer - League Studios

As a Principal Data Engineer - Tech Foundations, you will design, build, and evolve the scalable data pipelines, models, and platforms that power critical data products for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. These systems form the underlying data foundation for League Studio, enabling high-quality decision-making across both in-game and around-game experiences, operating at scale in real-time and batch environments.

In this role, you will act as a technical leader and multiplier, setting data engineering standards, influencing architectural direction, and solving the most complex data problems across the studio. You will partner closely with product, insights, and production leaders to ensure data systems are trustworthy, performant, and aligned with player and business outcomes. Your work will directly shape how League Studio understands players, evaluates features, and operates live games.

You will report to the Sr. Engineering Manager, Warehouse Analytics and Reporting Data, within Tech Foundations. This role is based out of our Los Angeles headquarters.

Responsibilities

• Design and own large-scale data architectures, including ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving layers for both real-time and batch data workloads.
• Build and maintain high-quality, reliable data pipelines and data models that power analytics, experimentation, ML, and reporting use cases across League Studio.
• Set and drive best practices for data engineering, including data quality, reliability, observability, schema design, and lifecycle management.
• Serve as a technical authority and mentor, influencing design decisions across teams and raising the overall bar for data engineering craftsmanship.
• Partner with product, insights, and engineering teams to translate business and player questions into scalable, well-modeled data solutions.
• Lead complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams or systems, proactively identifying and mitigating architectural and operational risks.
• Improve data accessibility and self-service capabilities while ensuring appropriate governance, privacy, and compliance standards.
• Contribute to long-term data platform strategy, balancing near-term delivery with sustainability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Stay current with industry trends in data engineering and analytics platforms, applying new approaches where they create clear leverage.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale data systems in production environments.
• Strong expertise with building and operating data pipelines using Python, SQL, and Spark, along with modern data stack tools such as dbt, Databricks, Airflow, and Monte Carlo.
• Deep experience with data engineering fundamentals, including data modeling, distributed systems, and pipeline design.
• Proven experience designing and operating batch and streaming data pipelines at scale.
• Experience working with modern data warehouses, data lakes, and analytics platforms.
• Strong understanding of data reliability, quality, and observability practices.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.

Desired Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience supporting game analytics, experimentation platforms, or ML workflows.
• Familiarity with real-time data processing frameworks and low-latency data systems.
• Experience designing data systems that operate in live, player-facing environments.

For this role, you will 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!

Our Perks:

Riot focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parenta