Manager, Anti-Cheat Engineering - Central Technology, Anti-Cheat

Riot’s Anti-Cheat team is versatile and passionate about its craft. We understand the player impact of cheating in games and are focused on setting the highest bar for the integrity of multiplayer games. We relish the opportunity to work with low-level systems and take pride in developing creative, rigorous defenses against adversaries. At the most fundamental level, our goal is to promote the best player experience by protecting the legitimacy of their favorite games.

As a Manager, Anti-Cheat Engineering, you will lead the team responsible for the ongoing development and evolution of Vanguard Anti-Cheat’s Windows client services. You’ll set technical direction, shape priorities, and ensure the team delivers secure, reliable capabilities across Vanguard’s Anti-Cheat suite in a timely manner. While your primary focus will be enabling the team and driving outcomes, your strong fluency in cheat communities and techniques will allow you to guide architecture, challenge technical decisions, and step directly into complex debugging or investigations when needed. You’ll help the team anticipate and analyze emerging cheat techniques, then translate those findings into effective detections, mitigations, and preventative controls. 

Responsibilities

• Manage, identify, recruit, interview, and hire engineers to help the team scale effectively
• Set direction and drive high-impact anti-cheat capabilities from ambiguity through production across user-mode, kernel-mode, and obfuscation tooling surfaces
• Lead the team in rapidly translating emerging threats into resilient detections and preventative countermeasures that can be safely deployed at scale
• Balance immediate threat response with proactive technical investments that anticipate adversaries’ next moves or eliminate common abuse vectors entirely
• Guide and participate in complex investigations involving highly evasive cheats and operating-system manipulation techniques
• Ensure the team can diagnose and resolve complex compatibility, reliability, and security issues in highly opaque environments, stepping into the details when needed
• Build trusted relationships with game teams as internal customers, helping them understand their cheating ecosystems, integrate Anti-Cheat effectively, and make informed tradeoffs across security, player experience, scope, and delivery
• Establish clear priorities and technical expectations, helping engineers navigate uncertainty and make sound decisions across security, compatibility, performance, and operational risk
• Partner across engineering, product, operations, and game teams to align dependencies, communicate risk, and deliver anti-cheat capabilities successfully across Riot’s portfolio

Required Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience leading product or developing engineers, either as an Engineering Manager or as a Technical Product Lead
• Familiarity with cheat-development or game-security research communities and a practical understanding of modern cheat techniques and anti-cheat evasions
• Strong understanding of Anti-Cheat architectures, with the ability to evaluate designs, guide technical discussions, and engage directly when complex problems require it
• Experience leading work on low-level, security-sensitive systems and helping teams navigate tradeoffs across security, reliability, compatibility, performance, and delivery
• Working knowledge of Windows security model and security feature suite such as Secure Boot, HVCI, and measured boot attestation

Desired Qualifications

• Familiarity with reverse-engineering techniques and workflows, including the analysis of packed, protected, or obfuscated binaries, with the judgment to translate technical findings into priorities, investments, and defensive strategy
• Working knowledge of the Windows kernel and driver model, sufficient enough to guide architecture, assess technical risk, and oversee the development and operation of production-grade kernel-mode drivers
• Working knowledge of advanced evasion techniques involving hypervisors, DKOM, EPT manipulation, vulnerable drivers, or hardware-assisted cheats, with the ability to reason about their implications for product and technical strategy
• Basic understanding of runtime integrity verification, behavioral detection, client attestation, and other signature-less anti-cheat techniques, including how to prioritize investments across these defensive approaches
• Experience balancing near-term responses to emerging threats with longer-term, proactive investments intended to anticipate how adversaries and the broader security landscape will evolve
• Experience partnering with internal customers, building trusted relationships, translating their needs into technical priorities, and leading productive conversations around scope, risk, sequencing, and delivery tradeoffs

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, everyone at Riot is part of our mission. And just like in our games, we’re better when we work together. Our goal is to create collaborative teams where you are empowered to bring your unique perspective everyday. If that sounds like the kind of place you want to work, we’re looking forward to your application.

It’s our policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and members of Riot Games, Inc. Riot Games makes reasonable accommodations for handicapped and disabled Rioters and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, handicap, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable federal and state law. We consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law, including the California Fair Chance Act, the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the Washington Fair Chance Act.

Per the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the following core duties may create a basis for disqualifying candidates with relevant criminal histories:

• Safeguarding confidential and sensitive Company data
• Communication with others, including Rioters and third parties such as vendors, and/or players, including minors
• Accessing Company assets, secure digital systems, and networks
• Ensuring a safe interactive environment for players and other Rioters

These duties are directly related to essential operations, safety, trust, and compliance obligations within our organization. Please note that job duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security.