Principal Data Engineer - Central Product Insights

Riot’s Data Engineers harness petabytes of data and state-of-the-art processing technologies to build products that elevate the player experience at massive scale. Turning this data into meaningful insights is a complex challenge, and our engineers meet it by staying deeply player-focused and collaborating across diverse teams to improve the lives of millions of players worldwide.

As a Principal Data Engineer within the Product Insights team supporting Publishing and eSports, you will design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines and models that power critical data products, including centralized player data models, esports viewership analytics, player support insights, and publishing activity data systems. These systems support understanding of player onboarding funnels, engagement patterns, support efficiency, and content effectiveness. You will collaborate with product managers, analysts, and engineers to ensure our data infrastructure is reliable, performant, and directly tied to delivering better player experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and optimize scalable ETL pipelines for structured and semi-structured data supporting Insights use cases, growth metrics, pubsports, and other out-of-game data sets.
• Design and implement data models using industry best practices that capture a complete ecosystem view of in- and out-of-game experiences, while ensuring accuracy, scalability, and long-term usability.
• Architect and implement robust, maintainable, and high-performance data solutions.
• Automate workflows to reduce manual intervention and enhance data processing efficiency, including automation for content, growth, and pubsports areas of coverage.
• Mentor data engineers across all levels, setting best practices and fostering technical growth.
• Optimize query performance and resolve pipeline bottlenecks to improve data accessibility.
• Evaluate and adopt new tools, frameworks, and methodologies to advance data engineering capabilities.
• Support cost optimization by ensuring scalable and efficient data solutions.
• Ensure data quality, governance, and compliance with regulatory standards (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).
• Contribute to Riot’s Data Engineering discipline shaping infrastructure, craft standards, tooling, and organizational best practices

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years experience in data engineering or a related field.
• Strong Expertise in big-data technologies, including Python, GoLang, Spark, Scala, SQL, and tools like Airflow and dbt.
• Proficiency in cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP) and Databricks.
• Expertise in designing efficient and scalable data models with large data sets across multiple teams and in collaboration with insights or data stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, analytics, and product teams.
• Proven experience mentoring and guiding other engineers.

For this role, you'll 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, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

At Riot Games, we put players first. That mission drives every decision in our quest to create games and experiences that make it better to be a player. Whether you’re working directly on a new player-facing experience or you’re supporting the company as a whole, e