Senior Data Scientist, Skill & Matchmaking - VALORANT Data Ops

Riot Data Scientists combine their broad technical expertise across data processing, automation, machine learning ("ML"), artificial intelligence ("AI"), and experimental design to inform decisions and develop data-powered products. As a Senior Data Scientist, you’ll dive into projects across all areas of game development and will directly impact Riot’s live games. You’ll work at a cross team scope, contribute to product vision, inform technical designs, and design datasets & models for our most important data applications.

As a Data Scientist on the Valorant Data Ops team, you will answer the question “How can data help us deliver the best possible player experience, at launch and beyond?” You will use pre-production datasets and simulations to help designers answer their most nuanced game questions. You will build production quality ML models for skill estimation, game understanding, matchmaking, personalization, and more.

You will collaborate with producers, game designers, analysts, and engineers – on game teams directly and in partnership with shared platform teams. You will report directly to the Data Science Manager within Valorant Studio.

Responsibilities:

• Use machine learning to build products or inform decisions that directly improve the player or fan experience

• Deeply understand the landscape of skill-related problems across our titles, flag new product opportunities, and establish best practices for experimentation and evaluating success within the context of Skill systems

• Own the ML and AI iteration loop including dataset creation, feature engineering, technical discovery and prototyping, model tuning, and model management.

• Build ML and AI tools and products for game development, working with stakeholders and engineers to design and deploy dashboards, web apps, forecasts, and simulations.

• Continually improve our data science practice by identifying novel applications of existing capabilities as well as brand new technical approaches to address critical game and business problems

• Develop relationships with game producers, designers, QA, product managers, and engineering to ensure ML-oriented game features can launch successfully

• Represent data products to non-technical partners and collaborators

Required Qualifications:

• Experience delivering full-stack solutions from requirements gathering through live deployment, with hands‑on ownership of design, coding, testing, and release

• Previous experience working on skill‑based matchmaking systems (or in optimizing player experiences) for large, multiplayer online games

• Masters in Machine Learning, AI, Statistics, Math, or related Computer Science/Quantitative field, or equivalent professional experience (i.e.

B.Sci with 3 years of professional experience, etc.)

• 2+ years of experience with applied data products in gaming or entertainment

• Expertise in Python and SQL

• Expertise in machine learning frameworks such as tensor flow, torch, scikit‑learn, or Spark MLlib

• Experience in the design, implementation, and analysis of online experiments

• Experience developing and deploying machine learning models at scale

• Effective at storytelling with data to a diverse and non‑technical audience

Desired

Qualifications:

• Previous experience working on skill‑based matchmaking systems (or in optimizing player experiences) for large, multiplayer online games

• Experience designing and implementing online services and features at scale

• Experience with big‑data platforms such as Spark and Airflow

• Experience with modern deep learning frameworks in practical applications

• Familiarity with game development engines, tools, and processes

• Fighting game genre exp / passion

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,…