Senior Researcher - Unpublished R&D Product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As a Senior User Researcher for Riot Discovery Studios (RDS) on an unpublished R&D product
, you will be part of a team developing a brand new game experience. You’ll conduct a wide range of studies and analyses — including playtests, qualitative interviews, and global market surveys — 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, engineering, etc.)

to turn the findings of your research into actionable insights which guide the course of game product development. Your applied 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. You will report to the Director of Insights.

• Drive user research efforts on game teams in partnership with production, design, creative, and publishing leadership on high complexity, ambiguous problem spaces to help direct the experience of our new games, systems, and features.
• Construct and perform labs, studies, and surveys — sometimes with novel or complex methodologies — designed to answer business, design, development, and usability questions.
• Be an advocate for our players and provide strategic guidance about their wants, needs, and behaviors.
• Meaningfully contribute to discussions on the best way to conduct and improve testing and audience research work for games in development.
• Help to drive operational best practices and craft standards for how we use user research in RDS Office.
• Share your results with game and RDS leadership in clear, illustrative presentations that drive meaningful change.
• Mentor other researchers, helping them learn from your experiences.

• Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Anthropology, Human‑Computer Interaction, or a related discipline plus 4 years of relevant research experience in game development.
• Experience in user research, especially in testing methods that yield useful qualitative sentiment (i.e. discussions, IDI), quantified sentiment (i.e. surveys), and direct observation of behaviors (i.e. think aloud).
• Experience running playtests in a variety of paradigms potentially including moderated testing, unmoderated testing, focused feature‑specific testing, holistic and longitudinal testing, and more complex or constrained testing paradigms.
• Trusted to operate independently regardless of structure, owns larger problems/projects/work streams.
• Ability to work collaboratively with others.
• Experience synthesizing and presenting data for maximum impact and understanding.
• Experience designing and performing basic survey research.

• Experience conducting games user research during the early stages of the development life cycle particularly incubation, prototype, and pre-production.
• Familiarity with publishing and broad market research including methods for concept testing and large scale quantitative surveys.
• Familiarity with basic statistical methods for data analysis (regressions, correlations, factor analyses).
• Familiarity with qualitative methods and analysis.
• Experience leading complex projects with multiple collaborators and work streams.
• Experience managing vendors.
• Experience working with leadership at the “team of teams” level on strategic and operational problems.

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…