Publishing Platform is building the capabilities that connect Riot’s games, players, and broader ecosystem. Within the Publishing Platform, the Commerce Initiative creates a unified foundation for how players discover, purchase, earn, and receive champions and cosmetics across Riot’s games and experiences.
As the Director, Technical Product Management and Commerce Initiative Product Lead, you will own the product vision, strategy, and outcomes for the Commerce Initiative team of teams. You will lead a portfolio of product teams and product leaders across Commerce, aligning Inventory, Progression, Store, Fulfillment, Payments, Fraud, Partnerships, Configuration, Tooling, and related capabilities around a coherent platform strategy and a compelling value proposition for players, game teams, and Riot.
You will combine strong product judgment with technical depth. You will guide investment in player experiences, live services, data, machine learning, workflows, release pipelines, and platform capabilities; make difficult tradeoffs across teams and time horizons; and ensure that Commerce becomes a scalable force multiplier for Riot’s games rather than a collection of disconnected products.
This role requires leadership through both formal ownership and influence. You will partner closely with engineering, design, data, operations, machine learning, publishing, game teams, Publishing Platform leadership, and senior leaders across Riot to turn ambiguous opportunities into durable products and measurable outcomes.
Responsibilities:
Set the Commerce Product Direction
- Own and communicate the Commerce Initiative vision, mission, strategy, and multi-year roadmap, translating Riot and Publishing Platform priorities into clear investments, product goals, and success measures.
- Identify emerging player, game-team, business, and technology opportunities, determining where Commerce should lead, partner, or deliberately not invest.
- Ensure Commerce strategy balances player and game-team needs, business outcomes, and long-term platform health while creating shared value across its products and teams.
Lead a Multi-Team Technical Product Portfolio
- Lead product management across a portfolio of commerce products, services, and platform capabilities, establishing clear ownership, decision rights, and accountability across teams.
- Drive prioritization and sequencing across competing opportunities, balancing customer value, business impact, technical risk, operational costs, time to value, and organizational capacity.
- Guide teams through the full product lifecycle, from discovery and strategy through delivery, adoption, operations, and iteration, ensuring accountability for outcomes.
- Establish effective decision-making frameworks that empower product leaders to navigate ambiguity, proactively address ownership gaps, remove obstacles, and operate with autonomy.
Drive Technical and Platform Strategy
- Partner with engineering leaders to shape a scalable technical strategy across services, data, machine learning, integrations, workflows, and platform capabilities.
- Lead complex technical product decisions involving architecture, technical debt, build-versus-buy, platform reuse, migrations, reliability, privacy, and compliance.
- Ensure Commerce capabilities are discoverable, usable, and economically viable for game teams and internal customers, improving developer experience and operational efficiency.
- Advocate for foundational technical investments by connecting platform health and architectural decisions to player value, business outcomes, and long-term strategy, while anticipating systemic risks, cross-product dependencies, and downstream impacts.
Build Customer and Stakeholder Alignment
- Champion player and game-team needs, developing a deep understanding of internal customers, publishing partners, and developer workflows to inform product decisions.
- Build trusted relationships and alignment across senior stakeholders in Publishing Platform, Riot Publishing, game studios, finance, legal, compliance, data, and other partner organizations.
- Represent Commerce at the initiative and executive level, clearly communicating strategic priorities, decisions, tradeoffs, and risks while empowering product leaders to own their respective areas.
Deliver Measurable Outcomes
- Define and own goals, OKRs, KPIs, and health metrics that measure Commerce's impact across player experience, adoption, business value, reliability, cost, developer experience, and operational health.
- Leverage qualitative and quantitative insights to validate assumptions, inform decisions, and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Drive iterative delivery, learning from real-world usage and holding teams accountable for measurable outcomes, execution, and continuous improvement.
Grow the Product Organization
- Hire, manage, coach, and develop product managers and leaders, establishing high standards for product craft, technical credibility, strategic thinking, and execution.
- Build an effective leadership structure with clear ownership, strong decision-making practices, meaningful feedback, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Identify organizational capability gaps and partner with Initiative leadership on staffing, organizational design, and investment proposals.
- Develop future leaders and strengthen technical product management capabilities across Publishing Platform.
- Foster an inclusive, collaborative, and high-accountability culture aligned with Riot's values.
Required Qualifications:
- 12+ years of experience in product management, technical product management, platform product management, or a related field, including 8+ years leading and developing product teams or organizations.
- Demonstrated experience defining product vision and strategy across multiple products, teams, or technical domains, with a track record of delivering measurable customer and business outcomes through the full product lifecycle.
- Direct games industry experience building ecommerce platforms and experiences, including payments, fulfillment, fraud, storefronts, inventory, and administrative tools.
- Experience leading complex global products or platforms involving regional requirements, privacy, compliance, identity, payments, and other operational or regulatory considerations.
- Strong technical fluency, including experience with complex services, integrations, data, machine learning models, workflows, or developer-facing capabilities, and the ability to engage engineering leaders on architecture, system design, technical risk, technical debt, and tradeoffs.
- Demonstrated ability to make strategic prioritization and investment decisions in ambiguous, highly complex environments.
- Proven ability to influence across matrixed organizations, align senior stakeholders with competing priorities, and communicate complex decisions to technical and nontechnical audiences.
- Experience hiring, coaching, developing, and retaining senior product managers and product leaders.
Desired Qualifications:
- Experience designing products for internal technical customers, including game teams, engineers, and platform partners.
- Experience working in live services, consumer technology, entertainment, or other globally scaled product environments.
- Experience building reusable platform capabilities that reduce duplication, improve efficiency, and drive outcomes across multiple products or business units.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, product management, business, or equivalent practical experience.
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.
