Sr. Manager, Data Engineering - 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 Senior Engineering Manager for Data Engineering within the PubSports vertical, you will lead the evolution of PubSports’ data platform capabilities by operationalizing Riot’s data platform architecture, governance standards, and maturity frameworks. This role is responsible for modernizing PubSports’ data ecosystem and ensuring that data assets supporting player engagement, monetization, and insights are reliable, scalable, and aligned with Riot’s enterprise data platform standards. You will operate within Riot’s emerging Data Platform operating model, translating platform architecture and governance frameworks into production-grade data systems that deliver trusted insights and enable advanced analytics, experimentation, and machine learning. This role will also grow and lead a team of data engineers responsible for delivering durable data products that power analytics, business intelligence, and ML-driven player experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Lead modernization of PubSports data pipelines and architecture
• Implement and enforce medallion/lakehouse standards
• Eliminate duplicate or fragmented data workflows
• Ensure scalable, modular, and reusable system design
• Drive reduction of tech debt and legacy instability
• Establish SLIs/SLOs for critical datasets
• Drive clear dataset ownership and operational accountability
• Improve data quality monitoring and incident response discipline
• Align vertical standards with enterprise practices
• Partner closely with PubSports Product Insights to translate business requirements into durable datasets
• Accelerate time-to-insight through well-designed curated layers
• Ensure semantic clarity and standardized business metrics
• Support analytics, BI, and ML use cases with production-grade data foundations
• Operationalize Riot’s data maturity and governance frameworks
• Lead and grow a high-performing team of Data Engineers
• Drive predictable sprint execution and roadmap alignment
• Maintain high code quality and review rigor
• Coach engineers on scalable system design and data modeling
• Balance speed with architectural integrity

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years in data engineering or data platform roles
• 5+ years leading DE teams in production environments
• Deep expertise in Spark / Databricks
• Deep, production-level expertise in a major data engineering programming language such as Python or Scala
• Advanced SQL and dimensional modeling, Orchestration (Airflow or similar), Lakehouse / medallion architecture
• Proven experience designing and implementing real-time/streaming data pipelines using technologies like Kafka, Flink, or similar platforms
• Deep Experience in Data quality & monitoring frameworks
• Working knowledge of cloud-native data services (e.g., AWS/GCP/Azure) and a track record of data platform cost optimization and resource management.
• Expertise in data security and privacy engineering, including the implementation of robust access control (RBAC/ABAC) and data masking/anonymization techniques.
• Proven experience modernizing legacy systems
• Demonstrated ability to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience in gaming, large consumer platforms, or systems leading data modernization or transformation initiatives in a complex environment
• Track record improving data maturity ( e.g. SLI’s/SLO governance, reliability standards) Experience designing s