July 15, 2025
Riot Games
Valorant
After one year at Reddit, Riot Games contacted me so when I stopped working at Reddit, I contacted them back.
I applied for Project L (2XKO) at the Redwood City office which was close to San Francisco. The city I was living in at that time.
Meanwhile, during the interview process, they got an internal transfer on this job title that I applied for.
The good news is they liked my profile so I got an offer for the Valorant organization / game. Inside the offer, I will need to move to Seattle or Los Angeles. I choose and moved to Los Angeles a couple of months after I began to work for Riot Games.
Denewb
Denewb is a full week of training and onboarding about the Riot Games culture (koolaid?).
It was also the first Denewb onsite since the previous ones were done online because of the big cold/flu!
They gave us a Teemo Hat and we wore it during this week of formation.
The idea was interesting. The campus is big so if rioter (employee) see a person with
this hat around random places, you can expect the person is maybe lost so Rioters can give them some direction to where to go.
We got multiple sessions and we even tried and familiarized with some games (e.g. LoL, Valorant, ...). My favorite session was the security one. They have multiple funny stories about that.
The Denewb week was in a specific room but we also went to the Skywalker Theater to see some videos. This internal theater is usually used for live / conference and the story seems to be from when Lucasfilm moved out, Riot refurbished and preserved it.
Campus (Headquarter)
The campus structure looks like a big walkable section in the middle surrounded by multiple buildings around it.
Each building has different projects and functions (e.g kitchen, tech support, game devs, training, ...).
Riot games has a high culture of 1:1 meetings so the walkable section is useful with multiple paths to walk and sync with your co-workers.
Otherwise it will be done online.
The coffee shop is awesome. It is called Bilge Water and they provide any kind of drink (even thematic drink every month).
This place is really popular after lunch.
Riot also uses the "Eating your own dog food" pattern where every week, they will do a playtest on a game that you are working on or the company work.
The QA teams are very good (internal / external).
Coffee, food, snacks are also free (job perk).
But wait, there's more!
Riot games often bring their employees at Universal Studios for celebration (e.g. xmas, X years a game is released, ...)
They also provide in-game credits (e.g. LoL, Valorant) that you can send to your friends (credits renew every year).
This one is really nice where there is a minimal "forced" contribution (e.g. 5%) of your paycheck into your retirement account (401k).
I like this idea since when you are young, you usually don't think about that (The sooner you begin, the easier it will be for your retirement).
Like many tech companies, they also match the first X dollars for this 401k.
One of my coworkers will track all team coworker's birthdays and he will poke us in a private slack group to sign an electronic birthday card.
After one year, one of my coworkers sent me that through slack:
"You've been at Riot longer than 21.6% of active Rioters!".
It's an internal app where you can see how long people work there.
I tried after almost 2 years and here was the result:
"-YourName- started on 2023-XX-XX before 41.5% of other active Rioters.
Those are interesting numbers.
At the beginning, I was working on the campus but later, we transferred to a new building which is very close to the campus.
Alt-F4
Here is the view from the last floor of the apartment building I lived in.
It took about 30 seconds maximum to go from my apartment to this office.
The Riot Games campus is just behind (opposite direction / 180 degrees) and it's about 2-3 minutes to get there.
I was not living on the last floor of this building but the angle and direction of my apartment was on the Nakatomi plaza building!
At the base of the apartment building, there is a grocery store called: Gelson's.
And inside this grocery store, there is a bar with food. So we did a couple of happy hours there (usually Thursday).
It will be a small group of 4-8 rioters across different orgs and we talked about any kind of topics (e.g. game dev, movies, games, book, ...).
I remembered a couple of happy hours where we talked about at least one hour of FSM one time and the other one source control (Git vs P4).
It was funny and entertaining to see the pros and cons of everyone.
After ~2 years, I don't work anymore at Riot Games and it was an awesome experience.
Good thing I've chosen L.A, it was a nice place to see some filming locations.
Now, I'm focusing on a big project that took multiple years to achieve.
Hint: 45 (and it will probably be the next blog post).
Thanks for reading,
JS.