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

Riot Games•Los Angeles, CA

5d•$206,700 - $289,000

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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