Jobs / United States / Riot Games INC
Manager, Software Engineering - Publishing Platform, Core Game Loop
Riot Games INC · 🇺🇸 Los Angeles, USA; Mercer Island, USA
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 64 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 33 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Riot Games INC paid sponsored hires in similar roles1 certified filing for “Manager, Security Engineering” (Information Security Analysts) in CA: $173k–$173k, median $173k. Most were filed at wage level IV (100%) — 4 lottery entries, ≈61% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Riot Games INC
The US Department of Labor certified 64 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 33 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Riot Games INC →
About the role
Riot engineers bring deep knowledge of specific technical areas but also value the opportunity to work in a variety of broader domains. As an Engineering Manager, you’ll guide an engineering team through all the phases of the software development and operations lifecycle. You’ll also serve as a people manager, mentor, and coach for the engineers, overseeing performance management, growth opportunities, and accountability. The Core Game Loop owns services that power the player experience while they are in game and deliver data to downstream services after a game is completed. This includes game provisioning, game data delivery, and services that power leaderboards and match history. By concentrating expertise in game platforms, we are able to offer robust, scalable features to all current and future Riot games. As a Manager, Software Engineering on the Core Game Loop team, you will partner with the teams that create every Riot game, central technology teams, and teams in Tencent to ensure we are making excellent decisions, upholding a high quality bar, and operating efficiently in service of those players. You'll identify opportunities to centralize functionality and architect solutions that enable scalability and reliability worldwide. You will report to the Senior Engineering Manager of the Game Foundations org within the Publishing Platform. Responsibilities • Manage a team of 5+ software engineers; coaching them, providing performance management, identifying growth opportunities, and ensuring positive results • Partner and collaborate with Product Leads, Delivery Leads, and Technical Leads within the team and within Game Foundations org to align on the plan the team executes against • Support the technical vision and roadmap by allocating engineers and skill sets to meet goals and deliver results • Own the interviewing and onboarding process for new engineering team members • Be accountable for the technical health of the products owned by the team • Stay hands-on with the team's tech, overseeing the technical design, and deliverables of the team and working with the team's technical leadership • Regularly engage with the codebase by participating in code reviews and non-critical tasks • Build healthy relationships with other engineering teams across Riot globally, in order to foster cross-team collaboration • Own and operate live services, meeting reliability expectations, handling emergent issues, and supporting engineers during on-call troubleshooting Required Qualifications • Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience • 5+ years experience as a Software Engineer, preferably on technical product teams that build tooling for services and APIs • 2+ years experience directly leading an engineering team either as an Engineering Manager or Technical Lead • Experience managing engineers and actively participating in their growth and development • Experience recruiting candidates and growing an engineering team • Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and software at a high scale • Experience operating and maintaining live services, including handling emergent issues and on-call troubleshooting Desired Qualifications • Experience building services using Java, Kotlin, or Go • Experience developing using cloud infrastructure (such as AWS, GCP), using containers and orchestration (such as Docker, Kubernetes), managed using infrastructure as code (such as Terraform, Ansible) • Experience with CI/CD pipelines (such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins) • Experience with relational databases (such as MySQL) and key value stores (such as Redis). • Experience with queuing or stream-processing platform (such as Kafka) For this role, you'll find suc