Director, Technical Product Management: Commerce

Riot Games•Mercer Island, WA

7h•$251,700 - $351,900

About The Position

The Director, Technical Product Management and Commerce Initiative Product Lead owns the product vision, strategy, and outcomes for Riot's Commerce Initiative team of teams within Publishing Platform. The initiative builds a unified foundation for how players discover, purchase, earn, and receive champions and cosmetics across Riot's games and experiences. The role leads a portfolio of product teams and leaders across Commerce capabilities, aligning them around a coherent platform strategy and value proposition for players, game teams, and Riot. The role combines strong product judgment with technical depth to guide investment across player experiences, live services, data, machine learning, workflows, release pipelines, and platform capabilities. It makes tradeoffs across teams and time horizons, and ensures Commerce serves as a scalable force multiplier rather than a collection of disconnected products. The Director partners with engineering, design, data, operations, machine learning, publishing, game teams, Publishing Platform leadership, and senior Riot leaders to turn ambiguous opportunities into durable products and measurable outcomes. The Director sets Commerce direction and a multi-year roadmap; leads prioritization and the full product lifecycle across a multi-team portfolio; shapes technical and platform strategy; builds alignment with players, game teams, and senior stakeholders; defines measurable goals and health metrics; and hires, coaches, and develops product managers and leaders. The role also fosters an inclusive, collaborative, high-accountability culture aligned with Riot's values.

Requirements

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 and experience with complex services, integrations, data, machine learning models, workflows, or developer-facing capabilities; 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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Own and communicate the Commerce Initiative vision, mission, strategy, and multi-year roadmap, translating Riot and Publishing Platform priorities into investments, product goals, and success measures.
Identify player, game-team, business, and technology opportunities and decide where Commerce should lead, partner, or not invest.
Balance player and game-team needs, business outcomes, and long-term platform health across Commerce products and teams.
Lead product management across commerce products, services, and platform capabilities, establishing ownership, decision rights, and accountability.
Prioritize and sequence opportunities by customer value, business impact, technical risk, operational costs, time to value, and organizational capacity.
Guide teams through discovery, strategy, delivery, adoption, operations, and iteration, holding them accountable for outcomes.
Establish decision-making frameworks that enable product leaders to navigate ambiguity, address ownership gaps, remove obstacles, and work autonomously.
Partner with engineering leaders to shape technical strategy across services, data, machine learning, integrations, workflows, and platform capabilities.
Lead technical product decisions involving architecture, technical debt, build-versus-buy, platform reuse, migrations, reliability, privacy, and compliance.
Make Commerce capabilities 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 architecture to player value, business outcomes, and long-term strategy, while anticipating systemic risks and dependencies.
Champion player and game-team needs by understanding internal customers, publishing partners, and developer workflows.
Build trusted relationships and alignment with senior stakeholders across Publishing Platform, Riot Publishing, game studios, finance, legal, compliance, data, and partner organizations.
Represent Commerce at initiative and executive levels, communicating priorities, decisions, tradeoffs, and risks while empowering product leaders to own their areas.
Define and own goals, OKRs, KPIs, and health metrics for player experience, adoption, business value, reliability, cost, developer experience, and operational health.
Use qualitative and quantitative insights to validate assumptions, inform decisions, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Drive iterative delivery, learn from real-world usage, and hold teams accountable for outcomes, execution, and continuous improvement.
Hire, manage, coach, and develop product managers and leaders, setting standards for product craft, technical credibility, strategic thinking, and execution.
Build a leadership structure with clear ownership, strong decision-making, meaningful feedback, and professional growth opportunities.
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.