Senior Researcher - Unpublished R&D Product

The Insights discipline helps empower Rioters' decision-making to be more data-informed. We're an interdisciplinary group of scientists, consultants, and strategists from all sorts of backgrounds who join together to represent and advocate for gamers around the world. We believe that illuminating the globally diverse experiences, behaviors, and needs of gamers is critical to Riot living up to our player-focused mission. We're a group united by our love of games, science, and helping others succeed.

As a Senior Researcher on an unpublished R&D product, you will be embedded on a team developing a brand new game experience. You'll conduct a wide range of studies and analyses - including playtests, qualitative interviews, and usability studies - to inform the direction, experience, systems, features, and content of the game product. You’ll be part of an interdisciplinary team and work closely with Rioters from other disciplines (design, art, production, publishing, etc.) to turn the findings of your research into actionable insights which guide the course of game product development and publishing. Your applied and/or experimental research background coupled with your deep understanding of data will ensure that you’re an effective advocate for players and can provide strategic guidance about how to best meet players where they are.

Responsibilities:

• Perform user research efforts on complex ambiguous problem spaces to help inform the experience and direction of content, systems, features, and publishing strategies, in partnership with cross-functional leadership
• Construct and perform labs, studies, market research and surveys - sometimes with novel or complex methodologies - designed to answer product, design, development, and usability questions
• Conduct research to inform monetization strategy, including player value perception, pricing models, and purchasing behavior for cosmetic content
• Partner closely with analytics and data insights where appropriate to incorporate player data into your work
• Be an advocate for our players and provide strategic research-informed perspective about their wants, needs, and behaviors
• Meaningfully contribute to discussions on the best way to conduct and improve testing and audience research work for the game in development
• Closely collaborate and develop a high-trust relationship with teams at multiple levels of the game’s organization, becoming a trusted, self-starting and independent partner to support collaborator and stakeholder needs.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Psychology, Anthropology, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related discipline plus 5 years of relevant research experience in game development
• Broad experience in a variety of research methods including playtests, user interviews, and market research with deep expertise in at least one of these areas
• Trusted to operate independently regardless of structure and comfortable with owning large projects, problem spaces, and workstreams
• Experience synthesizing research into actionable insights and socializing to team and product leadership
• Trusted to operate independently regardless of structure, owns larger problems/projects/workstreams
• Ability to work collaboratively with others

Desired Qualifications:

• Meaningful familiarity and affinity for multiplayer competitive games
• Experience conducting games user research during the early stages of the development life cycle particularly incubation, prototype, and pre-production
• Experience conducting games user research during lead-up to launch and into live service
• Demonstrated familiarity with player value drivers for cosmetic content, including aesthetics, identity expression, rarity, theming, and social signaling within games.
• Familiarity with feature and content specific testing (RITEs, usability testing, content concept testing)
• Familiarity with basic statistical methods for data analysis (regressions, correlations, factor analyses)
• Familiarity with qualitative methods and analysis
• Experience managing vendors

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise and a collaborative spirit that prioritizes the delight of players. We will look at your past studies and experience, but for this role, we also look for dedicated people with a personal relationsh