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Riot Games Software Engineer Interview

Noobspectivee·4/13/2016, 1:29:04 AM·176 votes·20,234 views

I have a school assignment to interview a gaming software engineer and so I choose Riot Games. I was told by support to post here and hopefully get an answer back. Questions (Software Engineer)

  1. Your Name
  2. Your Specific Degree
  3. Your Place of Employment
  4. Your Contact info (If possible) (email address, phone, or etc)
  5. Please describe your engineering field
  6. what is your current job title
  7. Please describe your particular job and duties
  8. what is your average work schedule
  9. starting with high school, describe your educational background chronologically
  10. If you had to do it over, related to your career or education, would u do anything differently 11.What advice would u give to me as someone interested in pursuing a career path similar to yours?

Thank you in advance for answering these interview questions and if there are any questions that you are restricted from answering due to reasons, please feel free to skip and move on to the next question.

60 Comments

RiotRiotAaronMike4/13/2016, 11:43:56 PM38 votes

{quoted}

I have a school assignment to interview a gaming software engineer and so I choose Riot Games. I was told by support to post here and hopefully get an answer back. Questions (Software Engineer)

  1. Your Name
  2. Your Specific Degree
  3. Your Place of Employment
  4. Your Contact info (If possible) (email address, phone, or etc)
  5. Please describe your engineering field
  6. what is your current job title
  7. Please describe your particular job and duties
  8. what is your average work schedule
  9. starting with high school, describe your educational background chronologically
  10. If you had to do it over, related to your career or education, would u do anything differently 11.What advice would u give to me as someone interested in pursuing a career path similar to yours?

Thank you in advance for answering these interview questions and if there are any questions that you are restricted from answering due to reasons, please feel free to skip and move on to the next question.

  1. Aaron Hathaway
  2. Computer Science with a Software Engineering focus at Arizona State University
  3. Champion team at Riot Games
  4. Friend me in game
  5. I help write the software that drives interactive media like video games and web sites as well as tools for content creators.
  6. Software Engineer
  7. I implement the technical requirements for new characters as well as helping clean up existing code. Champs I have helped work on are Jhin, Kindred, Ekko, Rek'Sai, Gnar, and Sion's rework. Prior to that I was on the AI team and even before that I was on Player Behavior doing Chat Restriction as well as the Tribunal.
  8. I usually work from 9-10am until 7pm at night.
  9. In high school I took AP classes and some higher level Calculus classes. Next I went to Arizona State University knowing that I want to work in the games industry but also making sure that I get the generalist degree instead of focusing specifically on game development. After college and before Riot I worked at a couple of different medical software companies working on their web apps.
  10. I played far too many games in college and sometimes I wished that I paid a little more attention in class.
  11. Be doing stuff in your free time. Don't just do the work that you're assigned in class but also be working on your own passion projects. These kinds of projects will help you understand what goes into the entire project rather than just having the prescribed workload a teacher might give you.

I'd be happy to go into more details if you have any more questions. Please just let me know!

RiotRickVanPrim4/14/2016, 1:00:41 AM13 votes

{quoted}

I have a school assignment to interview a gaming software engineer and so I choose Riot Games. I was told by support to post here and hopefully get an answer back. Questions (Software Engineer)

  1. Your Name
  2. Your Specific Degree
  3. Your Place of Employment
  4. Your Contact info (If possible) (email address, phone, or etc)
  5. Please describe your engineering field
  6. what is your current job title
  7. Please describe your particular job and duties
  8. what is your average work schedule
  9. starting with high school, describe your educational background chronologically
  10. If you had to do it over, related to your career or education, would u do anything differently 11.What advice would u give to me as someone interested in pursuing a career path similar to yours?

Thank you in advance for answering these interview questions and if there are any questions that you are restricted from answering due to reasons, please feel free to skip and move on to the next question.

For Prospectivee,

  1. James Leitch
  2. Software Engineering (diploma says "Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering")
  3. Champion team at Riot Games (same as Aaron)
  4. I'll try to answer questions posted here or friend me in game.
  5. My career so far has been all gameplay stuff, which means working with designers (or other content creators) and building/improving systems to support the features they want. This can range from small things like hooking up an existing aim assist system, through larger things like building a buff system to drive elemental weapons and abilities/power ups (both examples taken from my previous job).
  6. Software Engineer
  7. Same as Aaron with regards to champions: build/debug/extend tech to support upcoming champions, while also trying to gradually improve the existing tech. Champs I've helped worked on are Azir, Kalista, Aurelion Sol, and some minor support for Gnar, Rek'sai, Bard.
  8. Usually around 11-7, periodically staying later if I'm really focused on something or there's a deadline.
  9. Where I grew up there weren't any AP classes, so I just took the normal stuff in high school. After graduating, I went into general engineering at University of Calgary. I chose engineering over science because it sounded cooler. Between 1st and 2nd year of university, I took a year off -- during which time I figured out I wanted to go into software and into games. After that I came back and chose Software Engineering as my major. Between 3rd and 4th year I interned at an educational software/hardware company, which is where I learned most of my practical skills (internships are important!). After interning, I finished my degree, graduated, and started at EA, where I worked for 2 years before getting my current job at Riot. It's worth noting that I started coding in grade 8, but I only ever thought of it as a hobby until I took that time off and decided it was what I wanted to do professionally.
  10. I would take the compiler class at university that I didn't want to get up for (it was at 8 AM). I would also suggest working on games in Unity/UE4 to build up a portfolio. I had tried to build a game/engine from scratch, which was a great experience, but not as relevant as building/working on gameplay systems, which is what you'd be doing in Unity/UE4.
  11. Be appreciative of how and why things work, not just that they do work. Curiosity and desire to learn are hugely important traits. Also try to work on some long term personal projects. I found a lot of school work didn't do a good job of preparing me for real work, because generally assignments involved solving individual problems in a vacuum, where the code is written once, and then thrown away. As a result, considerations like performance, maintainability, and extensibility get overlooked. Having something you work on over the course of several years will hopefully help build up these skills, in addition to whatever you learn in school.

Cheers, James

RiotKeeper Arcanus4/14/2016, 12:49:43 AM10 votes
  1. Angus McQuarrie
  2. Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering with a minor in Cognitive Science
  3. Game Systems team at Riot Games
  4. Friend me in Game
  5. My degree is an intersection of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering - both writing software as well as building analog and digital circuits. I've only ever professionally done software, although I've done it at many levels (web services, game logic, graphics drivers, line of business applications, etc.)
  6. Software Engineer
  7. I'm the tech lead for a new feature we're working on that involves touching a large number of different tech stacks. This means I write a lot of different kinds of code and am ultimately responsible for the technical quality of the work others are doing on these features. The latter primarily involves talking to people and doing architectural and code review. I also fix bugs in random systems like champion select, runes and masteries, in game items, vision stuff, etc.
  8. I usually work from about 8am to 6pm, although it varies and I have a lot of freedom to shift this around according to my needs.
  9. In high school I took every math, computer science (which my school offered) and science class (other than biology, which i now wish I had taken) class they offered. I TA'd Chemistry twice and took AP Physics and Chemistry. I was admitted to Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, which is a 5 year bachelor's program where you alternate 4 months school, 4 months internship. I ended up doing 6 internships at 5 places (two at a small .NET shop, one at Epson, one at Apple, one at Deloitte, and one at Microsoft). I took mostly digital logic (FPGA stuff, processor pipelining) and software courses, and dabbled in analog circuits. I failed 3 courses one term because I was doing too many extracurricular things and overloaded my term taking 7 classes at once, but talked my self out of being held back with the help of the Engineering society. When I graduated I got a job working on Xbox Live, and then on Halo at 343 Industries before coming to Riot.
  10. I would have taken more Biology stuff. In my opinion Genetic Engineering is going to be the next big paradigm shift on the scale of what software was and I would be better positioned to follow that with a bit more academic rigor. I don't really regret failing those courses, it's important to hit walls in your life so you can overcome them and it was character building.
  11. Network. Figure out what you want to do and attack that thing, do stuff in your spare time, go to conferences and meet people. Have opinions on things that are well developed and that you can articulate. Be interesting. I got my first internship because I had joined the ASIC club and helped design a phase-locked loop in Cadence. This had absolutely nothing to do with anything the company wanted me to do, but it made me stand out from the other 100 people that were applying for jobs in my class. I suspect I have gotten interviews because my resume talks about being interested in Bees (and I can describe in 30 seconds some interesting things about a bee's visual system when they ask me about it).

Cheers!

RiotDizzyKa4/14/2016, 1:29:27 AM9 votes

{quoted}

I have a school assignment to interview a gaming software engineer and so I choose Riot Games. I was told by support to post here and hopefully get an answer back. Questions (Software Engineer)

  1. Your Name
  2. Your Specific Degree
  3. Your Place of Employment
  4. Your Contact info (If possible) (email address, phone, or etc)
  5. Please describe your engineering field
  6. what is your current job title
  7. Please describe your particular job and duties
  8. what is your average work schedule
  9. starting with high school, describe your educational background chronologically
  10. If you had to do it over, related to your career or education, would u do anything differently 11.What advice would u give to me as someone interested in pursuing a career path similar to yours?

Thank you in advance for answering these interview questions and if there are any questions that you are restricted from answering due to reasons, please feel free to skip and move on to the next question.

1.) Amelia Von Haden 2.) Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering 3.) Experimental Gameplay Team on League of Legends 4.) Friend Aaron, he can get you mine as well ; ) 5.) Game engineering in a general sense is the creation and simulation of virtual worlds and their ancillary components. Some game engineers specialize in networking systems that send information between instances of the game and different kinds of servers. Others specialize in rendering, building visual simulations that produce a viewport into the simulation. Some engineers build tools to allow content creators to author content like VFX, animation, and AI. I'm a game engineer that specializes in gameplay so I build systems that simulate movement, camera, inventories, combat and so on. 6.) I prefer Gameplay Programmer. 7. ) Gameplay Programmers work closely with Designers, Animators, VFX Artists, 3D Artists, and QA to bring a feature from an idea on paper into reality within the game. Once the system is built a gameplay programmer supports iteration on that system when the system requires new features, needs bugs fixed, ect. Empowering and unblocking our teammates so that they can iterate fast, efficiently, and have the systems they need to build content is our top priority. I worked on Illaoi, Jhin, and some new champs on the Champion Team previously before moving to my current team where we are prototyping gameplay concepts for the future of League of Legends. 8.) 10-6 or 7 is pretty standard 9.) In high school I was lucky enough to have a fantastic programming teacher named Mr. Frisby. I went through C++ AP certification, Visual Basic Microsoft Certification, and my high school sent me on to take Java Programming and CISCO networking courses at a local technical college my Junior and Senior years. I went to the Milwaukee School of Engineering to study software engineering where my favorite courses were Operating Systems, Robot in a Box, Computer Security, and Modern Physics. My senior design project was a home brew game console with wireless controllers, multi core processor, always on dashboard, mp3 player, and custom games. I worked at EA Tiburon on Madden, Human Head Studios on Prey2 and unreleased titles, and BioWare on Dragon Age Inquisition and other titles. 10.) I definitely would have gone to a public school, but that is pretty specific to my personal situation. I would have also studied 3D vector mathematics harder before my first game studio interview. I dipped into them briefly in a computer graphics course in college, but the applications are so different between rendering triangles in computer graphics and aiming explosive rockets in 3D space for gameplay. 11.) There has never been more free professional game development tools! Its pretty exciting. As a student looking to get into making games there is an array of free game engines for you to begin learning and prototyping in. I would start building games as soon as possible. A finished game, no matter how small, is impressive to have on a resume. If you're interested in console / PC gaming then try to learn C++ and choose a game engine that allows you to practice those skills. If you're interested in mobile development learn Java / C# and play with Android's free SDK. Get comfortable with an IDE like Microsoft Visual Studio or Eclipse. Use a version control system like Git to store your project's progress in to become familiar with them. Learn your 3D math! :D

arc954/13/2016, 1:15:43 PM8 votes

as a cs major i really hope they answer this [slayer-jinx-catface]

Zielmann4/13/2016, 1:34:26 AM8 votes

Upvote for visibility. Good luck on the project!

Zedex4/13/2016, 12:00:41 PM5 votes

Sorry to tell ya, support told you to post here so he wouldn't have to deal with it. Was probably the end of the guys shift. Riot ain't coming. They don't address real issues, why would the address education threads like this?

Serika Zero4/13/2016, 12:46:36 PM5 votes

This is the kind of projects kids get in NA schools? It sounds like being interrogated by the police, even worse than my social skills 0w0

Really that's normal? If so, I'm moving to US, it should be sooooo easy to deal with people then

RiotRiot Gweezlebur4/14/2016, 7:23:03 PM4 votes

{quoted}

I have a school assignment to interview a gaming software engineer and so I choose Riot Games. I was told by support to post here and hopefully get an answer back. Questions (Software Engineer)

  1. Your Name
  2. Your Specific Degree
  3. Your Place of Employment
  4. Your Contact info (If possible) (email address, phone, or etc)
  5. Please describe your engineering field
  6. what is your current job title
  7. Please describe your particular job and duties
  8. what is your average work schedule
  9. starting with high school, describe your educational background chronologically
  10. If you had to do it over, related to your career or education, would u do anything differently 11.What advice would u give to me as someone interested in pursuing a career path similar to yours?

Thank you in advance for answering these interview questions and if there are any questions that you are restricted from answering due to reasons, please feel free to skip and move on to the next question.

  1. Michael Ivey
  2. Bachelor of Arts, Religious Studies
  3. Riot Games
  4. I’m @ivey on Twitter, I usually notice mentions there
  5. I work in Service Availability, writing mostly HTTP services and automation systems.
  6. Senior Software Engineer
  7. I write code. As part of that, I also write tests and build scripts and documentation. I spend a good amount of time talking about what we are going to build, how it will interact with other systems. I also help other members of the team with build scripts and automation.
  8. I start around 8 am most days, from my phone: checking email, reading news, catching up on chat. I usually get to my desk around 10:00. We have a daily meeting in the afternoon, and I usually have another meeting or three. I spend a lot of my time talking to other folks on my team, or working directly with them on projects. I usually call it a day by 6:30 pm.
  9. I left High School early, went to Georgia State University and got a 4 year degree in 5 years. I studied Film & Video, Folklore, and eventually Religious Studies. I graduated and went straight to work as a sysadmin.
  10. I made some decisions around where I worked a few times that I suffered for - working for people who weren’t kind, or ethical, or for projects that were doomed from the beginning. Those jobs led me to where I am now, though, so I don’t think I would change anything.
  11. Don’t feel like the only path is CS degree then grad school. If you’re passionate about learning and can do stuff on your own, it’s possible to make your own path.
Riot IronyMoose4/14/2016, 12:37:30 AM4 votes
  1. Dave Heironymus
  2. Bachelor of Science (Comp Sci), University of New South Wales (Australia)
  3. Riot Games
  4. Posting my email address on a public forum seems unwise... Happy to answer questions here.
  5. I work on the Sustainability Initiative, where we're working to improve the core tools for creating champions, skins and other features. My background is in general game engineering on consoles.
  6. Engineering Manager
  7. I do a few things: I mentor most of the engineers on Sustainability, I help Sustainability's Product Manager get the right technical context to make good product decisions, and I sometimes get enough time to write code. Whatever needs to be done!
  8. Usually 9am-6pm.
  9. Some computer classes in high school, then Comp Sci at college (or "uni" as we call it in Australia).
  10. Maybe work harder in college? I was a bit of a slacker, but I finished strong! My career has had ups and downs, but I wouldn't change much.
  11. Just write code, no matter what it is. Make games, websites, whatever you love, make more. If you want to be a serious coder, learn C++, and learn it well. Pretty sure Heimerdinger would write C++ Heimerdinger

Feel free to ask questions!

McKeifus4/13/2016, 8:15:29 PM2 votes

Rito plsssssssss hnnnggggg

DorkunedAuras4/13/2016, 1:54:58 AM2 votes

I'd send in a support ticket hoping that one of them would transfer it over to the engineering dpt.

Gated D Latch4/13/2016, 4:51:17 PM2 votes

Bump [slayer-jinx-wink]

R2D204/13/2016, 3:59:12 PM2 votes

https://zippy.gfycat.com/EasygoingFreshKingbird.webm you have my upvote - for Rito to notice you~

Troll for Trump4/13/2016, 6:24:33 AM1 votes

CertainlyT lol

rtbf221479704/13/2016, 11:38:47 PM1 votes

Bump! 12. How involved are you in other facets of design such as concept, items, design, etc?