Researcher Iii - Publishing, Valorant

At Riot, we deliver unforgettable gaming, esports, and entertainment experiences to our fans around the world. Publishing is how we connect with those players, and Publishing teams focus on creating harmonized, holistic experiences around and across our entire product portfolio. Core capabilities include marketing, strategy, commercial partnerships, community management, player support, localization, and other experiences that span across products. Publishing Insights is a team of business strategists, researchers, and analysts that sits within Publishing Strategy & Operations, focused on deepening Riot’s understanding of how to engage with players and fans. Our work uncovers meaningful insights that help teams translate product strategy into Publishing actions, define our audience needs and motivations, and measure and test business performance. 

As a Researcher III on this team, you will serve as the voice of our players and fans in critical and complex business discussions. Your strong background in insights, research, and audience strategy will ensure that you're an advocate for fans and can provide insight-backed guidance about audience wants, needs, and behaviors. You will serve as a senior individual contributor and thought leader to run research and analysis utilizing a broad range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including player surveys, ethnographies, focus groups, segmentation, and more. You will report into the Publishing Insights Lead for VALORANT but will have an opportunity to support early-stage Riot products (including unreleased titles). This role is a hybrid work position, with some work onsite and some work from home. The onsite work location is at our global headquarters in Santa Monica, CA.

Responsibilities:

• Work with Publishing leadership to create and manage a research roadmap, lead studies using the appropriate methodologies to meet those needs, and present results back to leadership
• Grow our knowledge of priority audience motivations, behaviors, and demographics outside of our gaming products through qualitative and quantitative research
• Develop Publishing’s R&D research priorities, process, and platform, coordinating with partner teams to invest in necessary partnerships, tools, and data
• Partner cross-functionally with Business Intelligence and data teams to analyze and visualize research findings and reports
• Manage 3rd party research vendor projects, timelines, markets, budgets, and incorporate findings into actions that can be applied to our research roadmap
• Serve as an informal mentor in the professional development of junior analysts and researchers in the research craft

Required Qualifications:

• 6+ years experience in consumer research, insights, or related experiences (advanced degrees included)
• Professional experience personally implementing qualitative and quantitative research methods, including hypothesis generation, in-depth interviews or ethnography, survey design and scripting, sampling methods, fielding, data cleaning, analysis, and insights presentation
• Strong hypothesis-driven research skills with experience across a broad range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies
• Market research procurement and vendor management experience
• Ability to develop strong, open, and collaborative working relationships with peers and senior leaders 
• Deep knowledge of - or professional experience in - gaming or adjacent industries
• Applied experience with data analysis of large research datasets, such as clustering analysis (k-means or latent class), basic regressions, or similar

Desired Qualifications:

• Graduate degree or meaningful work experience in research-related fields, such as Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Human-Computer Interaction, Statistics, Economics, or Marketing
• Experience working with common self-serve insights and data platforms, such as DataAI (formerly AppAnnie), GlobalWebIndex, NewZoo, NPD, or YouGov
• Proficient in one or more statistical analysis platforms such as SPSS, R, or Python 
• Basic SQL knowledge
• Experience working with global teams across diverse cultures

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!

Our Perks:

Riot focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

Riot Games fosters a player and workplace experience that values teamwork embodied by the Summoner's Code and Community Code. Our culture embraces differences as a strength, and our values are the guiding principles for how we approach work. We are committed to putting diversity and inclusion (D&I) at the center of everything we do and promoting a fair and collaborative culture where Rioters treat one another with dignity and respect. We encourage you to read more about our value of thriving together and our ongoing work to build the most inclusive company in Gaming.