Manager, Software Engineering - VALORANT, Competitive

Riot engineers bring deep knowledge of specific technical areas but also value the opportunity to work in many broader domains. As an Engineering Manager at Riot, you’ll gain organizational alignment by building a strong engineering vision and offering creative solutions to organizational design. You will also serve as a mentor for a team of engineers, overseeing their performance and supporting their growth.

VALORANT is Riot’s take on a character-based tactical shooter (for more info on VALORANT click here!).

As a Manager, Software Engineering on the VALORANT team, in addition to working in the code, you’ll also guide engineers on the team to grow in their careers and help the overall team meet its product and technical goals. You will help lead the delivery of new features and content to a live, tactical shooter on multiple platforms. As a leader on our Competitive team, you will concentrate on building and improving features for players. Besides working with and leading the engineers on our Competitive team, you will have strong collaborations with other disciplines. You will report to the Senior Manager of Engineering of the project.

This is a full-time role, based in Sydney, Australia.

Responsibilities:

• Manage an engineering team developing player facing features, ensuring good practices are maintained, and collaboration is fostered between disciplines and other teams to constantly deliver value to players.
• Participate in discussions about our product vision and ensure that vision is clear to your engineers and their respective teams.
• Guide technical design of client and backend features, ensuring long-term maintainability and scalability.
• Break down multi-month projects into smaller projects and tasks.
• Implement and champion engineering standards to ensure high quality code.
• Coach more junior engineers through code reviews and 1-on-1 feedback.
• Troubleshoot live service issues as part of an on-call rotation.
• Mentor engineers identifying stretch opportunities for them to grow. 
• Manage the health and performance of the engineering team with empathy and authenticity, building trust, and inspiring them to overcome challenges. 
• Seek different perspectives to solve problems, encouraging engineers and others to contribute ideas. Base your decisions on sound analysis and avoid biases.
• Provide technical expertise throughout the product life cycle including design, implementation, and delivery of features while continuously improving the software engineering quality and efficiency.

Required Qualifications: 

• 2+ years of experience directly leading a software delivery team either as an Engineering Manager or Technical Lead & mentor.
• 5+ years of experience as a hands-on software engineer.
• Experience across multiple systems and languages.
• Experience collaborating across departments and disciplines to create solutions.

Desired Qualifications:

The Manager in this role will lead a team working on social and competitive systems within the Unreal Engine, with a focus on building an exceptional user experience for players across multiple platforms.  Ideal candidates will have broad experience which cover 1 or more of the following:

• Professional experience building game client features, preferably with Unreal.
• Experience building UI systems.
• Experience building high-performance backend services.
• Experience delivering complex features in a live game or product.
• Experience working in an agile environment.

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:

At Riot we strongly believe in work / life balance, and we encourage that with our open paid time off policy, paid parental leave (for both primary and secondary carers) and flexible work schedules to fit your lifestyle. We also believe that work should be fun, we have co-op gaming areas, a play fund so you can broaden and deepen your knowledge of players and community, and all the snacks you would ever need to power through your day (even healthy snacks!). And that’s not all we offer, there’s also:

• Medical Insurance that covers you and your dependents
• Employee Assistance Program
• Wellness fund
• Donation matching of time and money to registered charities
• Learning and Development opportunities

Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code. Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work. We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do, and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect. We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming.

Client-provided location(s): Sydney, Australia

Job ID: 7194259

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-08-26T23:30:22