Hi All,
As always we are hiring, and are particularly hiring experienced people. If you are part of some of the recent layoffs that have hit our industry, or you happen to be considering your next opportunity already, we'd love to see if there's a fit.
LoL is a big project, but there's a lot of things to do, and as the community tells us every day, there's more we could be doing. To do more things at the same time successfully, we need great leaders. What I'm referring to is the ability to enact positive change, make great design decisions, and have good judgement on complicated, ambiguous problems that involve things beyond just design.
Here are some of the advantages to working here:
1) If LoL happens to be your favorite game, I guess that means we uniquely are able to offer you the opportunity to work on your favorite game 
2) We enable people who want to get things done to get things done. We don't believe in holding people to their specific job role -- our system enables significant flexibility beyond it. This is super empowering for the right kind of person.
3) We will empower anyone who can lead to be a leader here (after of course they empower themselves). In general though, you need not have prior titles as 'lead designer' to be a lead designer here. Many of the traditional 'lead designer' tasks here, like owning large new systems, don't require a large design team, and are led by a game designer or senior game designer. Of course, anyone doing these needs to have great judgement.
4) LoL has been pretty successful, and as such, offers a lot of unique problems to solve, and a lot of players to please if you do your job well. Additionally, as a live game that people are playing all the time, it's a very, very different feel than most other game industry projects. You get faster feedback on things that work, have different concerns, and so forth. I think that a natural inclination of people is to assume that because LoL is a released game that there are less design problems to solve. I used to think this might be the case, but it turns out, there's actually in some cases more.
5) Our work life balance is pretty good. Crunch as is traditionally understood has not been something the design team has experienced since before LoL shipped.
6) If you like mentorship, there are a lot of great opportunities here, and we value great mentors.
7) We compensate generously. I know this is not your primary motivation for considering us, but we live in a capitalist society, and being generously compensated for your efforts certainly can't hurt.
Here are some types of problems you could work on:
Champion Design
New Features
Social Systems and Player Behavior Systems
Play balance
Updates/Overhauls to older maps
Lots more...
There's a lot of different types of opportunities. I'll be at GDC of course, and we are always filtering resumes. Feel free to apply for Lead Designer or Sr Designer if interested (or any other role that fits you):
http://www.riotgames.com/careers/lead-designer
http://www.riotgames.com/careers/senior-game-designer
Also have a design director spot open:
http://www.riotgames.com/careers/design-director
And of course, yes, we are hiring interns for the summer:
http://www.riotgames.com/internships
FAQ:
Q:Zileas, does this mean that [insert possible adverse personnel problem] has happened?
A:No. Riot is a fast growing company, and the needs of the organization are growing along with that. To do all of the projects within LoL, and to be in a good position for any future ambitions, we need additional capable design leaders. This is an opportune place to look, and I do it periodically every few months.
A2:Also, I got out of male modeling because of how the modeling industry over-sexualizes males. I became tired of other people defining my worth around my attractive looks, and my therapist tells me that being a game designer is better for my self-esteem.
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VP of Game Design
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