Senior Technical Game Designer - Unpublished R&D Product

Location: Shanghai, China

Department: CN Game Studio

Riot Games was established in 2006 by entrepreneurial gamers who believe that player-focused game development can result in great games. In 2009, Riot released its debut title League of Legends to critical and player acclaim. As the most played video game in the world, over 100 million play every month. Players form the foundation of our community and it’s for them that we continue to evolve and improve the League of Legends experience.

We’re looking for humble but ambitious, razor-sharp professionals who can teach us a thing or two. We promise to return the favor. Like us, you take play seriously; you’re passionate about games. We embrace those who see things differently, aren’t afraid to experiment, and who have a healthy disregard for constraints.

That's where you come in.

As a Game Designer, you will design, tweak, and optimize the player experience. Your analytical skills, player insight, and creativity aid in crafting in- and out-of-game experiences that engage and surprise players. You will collaborate with interdisciplinary teams and work with every tool at hand to innovate and iterate player-focused designs that'll delight millions around the world.

As a Senior Technical Game Designer on the Unpublished R&D Product team, you will help turn ambitious design ideas into playable, sustainable game experiences. You will work across multiple areas of game design, partnering with designers, engineers, artists, and production to prototype new ideas, implement technically complex features, and improve how the design team builds and iterates content. This is a game design role with significant technical responsibilities. You will use your design judgment and technical fluency to bridge design intent and implementation constraints, reduce development dependencies, and help the team make informed trade-offs. You will report into the Game Director of the team.

Responsibilities:

• Design, prototype, implement, and iterate on game features and supporting systems across multiple areas of game design.
• Build and improve designer-facing tools, workflows, debugging capabilities, and validation processes that increase the quality and velocity of the design team.
• Own technically complex design features from initial framing through implementation, testing, refinement, and delivery.
• Work with design and product leadership to explore ambiguous problem spaces and turn promising ideas into playable prototypes.
• Develop multiple design and technical solutions, clearly communicating their player impact, trade-offs, risks, scope, and long-term maintenance considerations.
• Identify technical constraints, cross-system dependencies, and implementation risks early, and translate them into actionable design decisions.
• Establish reusable implementation patterns, best practices, and quality standards for technical game design.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in professional game design, including 3+ years of experience in professional technical game design or engineering.
• Deep expertise in one or more technically demanding game-design domains.
• Experience owning and delivering technically complex game features from concept through playable implementation.
• Strong game design fundamentals and the ability to connect technical decisions to player experience and product goals.
• Hands-on experience prototyping, implementing, and debugging gameplay in a modern game engine.
• Proficiency with visual scripting, text-based scripting, programming, or other technical content-authoring approaches.
• Ability to reason about system architecture, data structures, performance, testing, maintainability, and technical debt in a game-development context.
• Fluency in Mandarin Chinese.

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience working in a lead technical game design role, including mentoring or coaching designers in technical implementation practices.
• Experience creating designer-facing tools, content pipelines, automated validation, or debugging workflows, and designing sustainable technical solutions that enable other designers to work more independently.
• Experience with early-stage game development, rapid prototyping, and iterative playtesting.
• Experience in the Unreal game engine.
• Proficiency in spoken and written English.

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!