Engineering

Scott Gelb, a stalwart Missourian, brings his years of experience in software architecture to Riot Games. Formerly of Perpetual Entertainment, Scott spearheaded the online gaming platform for both Gods and Heroes and Star Trek Online. He is as core as core gamers get, holding a profound place in his heart for MMORPGS (like WoW, EQ1/2, UO) and FPS's like TF2, CSS, Q3. Outside of Riot, Scott enjoys bicep curls, visiting petting zoos, consuming delicious delicacies and taunting larger mammals like our Senior Producer Steve Snow.

Slicing tension with his blade of comedy, "The Gelb" has been known to reduce aggro by 200%, utilizing his goofy smile and self-deprecating humor.

Kevin Borer joins the company after spending several years in a variety of disparate fields such as combustion physics research, technology recruiting and information technology. When not working, Kevin enjoys accomplishing things that he has high degrees of skill in, such as eating and sleeping.

Kevin utilizes secrets from his post-grad work in combustion physics to enable him to code at a level of ungodly productivity. We really don't know how he does it - but he does.

Joel Anderson, originally from the town of Perth in Australia, joins Riot most recently from Perpetual Entertainment where he worked on Star Trek Online. A programming generalist, he excels at just about everything but is especially adept at whipping up delicious bits of C++. Like many of his colleagues at Riot his interests are games (favorite being Warcraft 2) and anime of the highest quality.

Joel, utilizing his experience under the tutelage of Macguyver, is able to read combat gameplay documentation and code it using only a pencil and a rubber band. His C++ mastery is that epic.

Around-the-world yachtsman extraordinaire, Andy joins the Riot engineering team after working at Obsidian Entertainment on Neverwinter Nights 2 and its expansion, Mask of the Betrayer. A Dungeons & Dragons fan and crafty Dungeon Master, he has run many intense campaigns, which aids enormously in crafting gameplay code. In addition to being an avid gamer, Andy enjoys laughing in the face of stormy weather on the high seas and wooing the ladies with his mad swing dancing skills.

Andy, utilizing his 24/7 watching system on Yacht, is able to navigate through any challenges faced on the high seas of C++.

Christopher has more than 10 years experience in the game industry where he has worked in a variety of genres across both the PC and consoles. While originally from Texas, the industry has taken him all over the USA and he now resides in Venice, CA, where he is responsible for coding gameplay systems for Riot. In addition to making games, Christopher is also an avid gamer who especially loves competitive multiplayer games. When away from mouse and keyboad, he loves rock climbing, bicycling, and playing with his cat Koopa.

Christopher claps his hand twice and he instantly accelerates all bodily function dramatically, solving problem after problem with intense accuracy, all the while pwning face in Street Fighter 3.

Cyriaque Kouadio hails from the Ivory Coast, making his way to Canada (Montreal) and then Redwood City, CA. He joins Riot Games from Electronic Arts where he worked on such titles as The Sims 3, Retriever, Jet Li: Rise to Honor. He also worked on the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within. With over 10 years of engineering experience, he joins Riot's Engineering Team bringing his C++ expertise and love of video games with him. In his free time Cyriaque loves riding motorcycles and practicing his Kung Fu. Yes, he knows Kung Fu.

When Cyriaque activates his ability, he gains the power to see through anything that stands in his way: darkness, fog, walls, and impossible engineering problems. Do not attempt to trick him, as he has already foreseen your tomfoolery.

Scott has been involved in the software industry for over 10 years working with technologies such as Java, PHP, and Flex. He has presented at industry conferences including JavaOne, QCon, and NFJS. Scott is currently interested in scalable architecture design and advanced UI development. Scott lives in St. Louis with his wife Dana and her cat. He grew up in Southern Illinois.

Scott calls upon the spirits of programmers who came before to delve into the very depths of platform code divining its true meaning and expelling any ghosts in the machine.

Michael grew up in Minnesota and received a Bachelor of Science in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Michael now lives in Hermosa Beach CA, with his wife Christy. Michael has over 20 years of experience in the software industry working with technologies such as Java, C++, Flex, JSF. Michael's vertical domain experience spans financial, telecommunications, manufacturing, and retail. In the late nineties, Michael's company focused on automated check-cashing ATM development. He developed one of the first Java-based ATMs (installed in 7 states) that provided money orders, ATM processing, check cashing with risk analysis. All of this was run from a data center in his back yard. After the 90's boom ended and he almost burned down his house, Michael refocused his attention to pre-paid mobile phone development. He launched one of the first pre-paid phones with Cingular that had the complete billing engine on the SIM card and an enterprise solution managing the data via SMS. Over the last several years, Michael has been focused on enterprise architecture and advanced UI development.

As Michael works on his code, he occasionally encounters an intriguing problem that is infinitely complex. He then breaks the space-time continuum and goes to the point where the code is already finished, finds out how he fixed it and then comes back and works on his code as usual. The neon dinosaurs and purple penguins are just a little after-effect of breaking the space-time continuum.

Barry was born in Florida, but moved around a lot as a kid. Barry holds master's degrees in music (composition and guitar performance) and bachelor's in music and computer science. Barry recently moved to sunny SoCal from the frozen tundra of St. Louis, MO, home to the highest volume of intelligent (and visually appealing) individuals IN THE WORLD. He was one of the first engineering consultants on the platform team and was persuaded to join Riot over a conversation and bottle of chloroform. Barry has recently assumed management responsibilities for platform engineering. Barry was educated as a musician. Outside of his own gigs, he's played with the St. Louis Opera Theater, with members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, wrote music for some local productions in St. Louis, and recorded a classical guitar duet CD (which he's MORE than happy to hand out copies of). Barry has also been in professional software development for the past 10 years or so. He's a huge proponent of evolutionary design and agile methodologies, and he's worked as a consultant on enterprise Java technologies for a considerable portion of that time. He’s architected or helped architect a number of large-scale projects, including systems for companies such as Monsanto and AT&T. He's also made presentations at industry conferences such as JavaOne.

When Barry and his code are having the most heated of arguments, and are not seeing eye-to-eye, he will woo the code with his song of love, melting all the troubles away.

David grew up in Boston and picked-up a few degrees along the road, including a BS from Caltech and a MS from UCLA. He has never surrendered his love of Boston sports and you will often hear him cursing the Yankees or the Lakers under his breath, as he passes you in the hall. Currently, David splits his time between LA and SF. For David, working at Riot completes a lifelong dream of working at a game company and we have to pinch him every day to remind him he's not dreaming (that and it's just plain fun). David has 10 years of enterprise software development experience. He has used a wide variety of technologies including Java, C++, and Objective-C. He has done everything from writing production automation software to architecting insurance policy administration systems (more interesting than one might think). Most recently, he worked for Grio as a consultant building Java technologies for a variety of interesting clients.

David's passive ability allows him to "Just Get It." When speaking in a different language he has never learned before, he instantly "Just Gets It." When dealing with troublesome code, he can take a look at it and "Just Get It."

Vic is a South Carolina native. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He worked in the fields of industrial control systems and enterprise financial services software before getting into game development. Before joining Riot, Vic worked at several game studios in the San Francisco area including Pirate, Perpetual, Nihilistic and Shaba. He has generally been focused on gameplay and server engineering. Vic is an avid outdoorsman enjoying hunting (yes even in California), backpacking, working out, snowboarding and spending time with his family. He plays a few games with Warcraft 3 being among his all time favorites.

Passive aura that relaxes nearby allies and enemies into a state of well being. This results in reduced aggro and movement speed for a while.

Jonathan McCaffrey, the first member of our web development team! Jonathan was previously a systems developer at Earthbound Trading Co. in Texas, where he was born 23 years ago (in Dallas). Besides running guilds in WoW and doing one-armed push-ups on hot coals, Jonathan also enjoys listening to NPR, trance, and the smooth sounds of a Pendragon's roar.

This power will solve even the most advanced problems with reasonable accuracy.

George has been a part of the game industry for the past five years, working primarily on casual and kids games and volunteering at the Game Developers Conference every year. Previously an avid DotA fan, George joined the League of Legends Beta and rocketed through the ranks to become a Master Beta player in the top 500. It was then that his destiny was revealed to him. He permanently joined Riot as a Flash Developer and lived happily ever after.

George calls forth upon his endless supply of snacks, beverages, and candy to empower him, granting him +200% productivity, immunity to sleep effects, and +300-600 additional Empty Calories while still being able to maintain his girlish figure. If "Sharing Means Caring" is toggled on, all allies within 10 feet gain +50% morale as well.

Ray is an active LoL player and hardcore gamer. Ray comes from a humble QA background of starting in Central Technology at Electronic Arts and becoming an Engineer for Central Tech on Bond: From Russia with Love and The Godfather. From there he moved to the Sims Division as a prototype engineer, then as a primary engineer on the Sims Carnival Game Creator. Ray is an experienced Flex/Actionscript programmer with a C/C++ background, but has needed to learn at least 1 new language in every job he's ever had ranging from Vector Unit ASM on the PS2 to Python.

Passive - Ray can learn almost any ability from other champions for 10 seconds, allowing him to be useful in any team fight.

Active - Activate This ability to deal over 9000 damage to the target with the new ability and stunning the target indefinitely, on top of any base effect the ability already has.

VerrDon is a lifelong gamer, including everything but LARPs and sports games. He has also been eating often since birth, frequently with a vengeance. VerrDon started programming in high school to support both habits. VerrDon is still giddy about joining Riot because now programming is about games too. He paused the gaming long enough to get married and spawn ravenous progeny. Turns out the end of all things is adorable.

VerrDon instantly recalls any fact from any game he has ever played.

Dave comes to us from St Louis where he has extensive experience building front-end and middleware Java applications (he claims to enjoy the seasonal shifts from extreme cold to hot that the St. Louis area has to offer). Dave brings to Riot a strong programming, math and butt-kicking background. He is happy to be working on interesting problems and doing generally awesome things with Riot Games. In his limited free time, Dave enjoys the brewing of ales and aspires to develop his own mediocre iphone games.

When confronted by particularly nasty problems, Dave eyes the multiarmed beast… sneers, and promptly dispatches his enemies in a flourish. Sliced and diced into smited pieces, Dave surveys the damage and molds the carvings into a more agreeable individual.

Michael Matsumura joined the Riot Games team after his plane home from Australia crash landed over the Riot Games headquarters in Culver City. In addition to a bachelor of science from UC Berkeley and an uncanny resistance to high velocity impact, Michael sports an impressive resume of both competitive gaming and programming experience. This experience includes work on the platform for both Flagship Studios and Perpetual Entertainment, as well as a stint as a software developer for the enterprise software company Elastra.

When not prowling the Fields of Justice in Runeterra or working on the PvP.net platform, Michael's hobbies include traveling through time and space to distant and deserted locales, and attempting to escape from remote islands populated by hostile indigenous people.

Michael has the uncanny ability to fire even the least aerodynamic of foam projectiles with alarming accuracy, often scoring headshots on coworkers many cubes away for lethal (or at least productivity reducing) damage.

Jianfei Liao, known mostly as "Fei" to his friends and coworkers, comes to the Riot Games platform team all the way from mainland China. After receiving several bachelor's degrees in surfing, luau parties, tropical archipelagos, macadamia nuts, and computer science from the University of Hawaii, Fei set a new world record by swimming across the Pacific Ocean into Southern California while wearing a straight jacket and a pair of cement shoes. There he took up residence as a Software Engineer for Trion World Network before moving on to join Riot in an attempt to escape the pressures brought on by his ever increasing celebrity status.

Fei has the uncanny ability to instantly research any foreign body of code, providing documentation on its inner workings to the rest of the team.

Luke comes to us from Dallas by way of Wash U in St. Louis with a CS degree. He's taken on the challenge of wrangling with the myriad internal build processes, along with applying his coding skills wherever they are needed for the Greater Good and occasionally peeking under the hood of the gameplay code. His favorite games range from Mega Man 2 to Natural Selection, plus Dwarf Fortress when the mood takes him.

Luke analyzes and dissects a troublesome manual task and replaces it with an automated mechanism performing an equivalent task. His power increases with each new automaton under his control.