Senior Insights Analyst - Central Strategic Insights

The Insights discipline empowers Rioters to be more data-informed. We're an interdisciplinary group of scientists, consultants, and strategists from all sorts of backgrounds who join together to represent and advocate for gamers around the world. We believe that illuminating the globally diverse experiences, behaviors, and needs of gamers is important to Riot living up to our player-focused mission. We're a group united by our love of games, science, and helping others succeed.

As a Senior Analyst on the Central Strategic Insights Team, you will use your deep craft expertise in market forecasting and cost estimation to inform strategic and operational decision making for all new major R&D games at Riot. You'll develop deep familiarity and rich datasets for the audience, revenue, and cost sides of video game development across the industry and internal to Riot, combined with sophisticated modelling & forecasting techniques to give senior decision makers a sophisticated understanding of a game’s ROI profile. You’ll work with game developers to help them understand the opportunity and audience for their game in order to better tailor their product towards their audience. Working as part of the larger Strategic Advisory team in R&D, you will also contribute to overall game product & operational strategy (such as prioritizing which game opportunities we are pursuing as a company). You will report to the Strategic Advisory Lead on the Strategic Research group in the R&D Office.

• Estimate the opportunity size and development cost associated with various opportunities in gaming in order to inform Riot’s priorities for new games
• Gather and organize competitive intelligence on the gaming market, triangulate between publicly-available data points, third-party purchased research, and data-informed inferences to estimate competitors' performance, and operationalize this information into decision making
• Interface with other internal experts on development cost (e.g. finance, tax, accounting) as well as internal financial tooling to build a picture of the costs of development, launch, and publishing
• Work with games to develop models of their target audiences & audience priorities so they can better tailor their games towards those audiences and involve those players in development
• Size audience & revenue, and forecast various costs (development, fees, support, overhead, etc.) in order to forecast the income statement or “virtual P&L” for in-development games to inform strategic (e.g. portfolio management) and operational decisions (e.g. infrastructure and headcount planning)
• Work with R&D Office leadership to support finance-related operational strategy questions like variance analysis, fund allocation, development team efficiency, etc.
• Manage R&D Office financial forecasting as part of Riot’s strategic planning and forecasting (SPF) process, and monitor & report on performance against plans

• Bachelor's degree and 4+ years (or 2+ years with an MBA) of professional experience in Finance, Consulting, Strategic Planning or other related experience with significant exposure to financial analysis, modelling and planning
• 2+ years experience building models to inform strategic and operational decision making
• Foundational finance / accounting knowledge with the ability to translate high-level input and ideas into financial statement analysis and scenario models
• Deep familiarity with games or the gaming industry
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to craft reports and presentations; comfort communicating with senior executives
• Proficiency with Excel or Sheets

• Proficiency with Tableau and SQL
• Expert knowledge of financial systems for planning and reporting
• Experience leading complex efforts with multiple collaborators
• Experience working with game development teams the early phases of the lifecycle from inception to production
• Adaptability, comfort in ambiguity

Riot has a focus on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy, in addition to 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.