Source: Riot Games Careers. Verified against multiple sources; datamines and reports are labelled as such, not stated as fact.
What Happened
Four Sydney listings name the Riot MMO in Riot's own recruiting copy, and one of them offers relocation and a visa to whoever takes it.
Riot will pay to move you to Sydney and sponsor your work visa, and the thing you would be building is the MMO. No leaker is involved. That offer sits on Riot's own careers site, inside four "Unpublished R&D Product" listings based in Sydney, Australia instead of Los Angeles.
The one that says it outright is REQ-0010038, a Staff Software Engineer for Automation & Build Systems.
"Our Sydney-based team contributes to the unpublished R&D Product. A highly anticipated Riot MMO, collaborating globally to build next-generation features and technology."
The same listing says "Candidates hired for this role must be based in Sydney, Australia," and that Riot "offers comprehensive relocation assistance and will sponsor the appropriate work visa." That is not a seat that just happens to be in Sydney. Riot wants specific senior people in that specific building and is buying the plane tickets.
One req can be noise. Four with reporting lines running between them is an org chart. REQ-0009863 hires an "Engineering Manager and tech lead of Automation & Build Systems on our unpublished MMO" who will "Lead and mentor a team of 2-6 engineers." The staff engineer in REQ-0010038 "will report to the Engineering Manager of the Automation & Release Systems team" and will "Troubleshoot live service issues as part of an on-call rotation."
REQ-0009985 is a Senior Technical Artist for Tools & Pipeline, reporting to a Manager, Technical Art and working alongside a Technical Art Director. It covers workflows for "Character Art, Animation, Environment Art, Audio, and VFX" across "multiple teams in parallel production streams," and asks for "Professional experience working in Unreal Engine 5" plus Python and PySide/PyQt.
REQ-0010166 is the odd one out. It is a Staff Software Engineer for Engine & Tools on a Tech Foundations team, and it is written almost entirely around AI. The hire "will be responsible for designing and implementing AI/ML driven tools and features," and one bullet reads "Lead the application of AI/ML systems to solve developer and player facing problems." Another asks them to "Partner with central teams to share AI-based solutions across Riot's portfolio."
Riot Sydney itself is not new. The studio came out of Riot's 2022 acquisition of the team at Wargaming Sydney, and Riot's careers material has described it as working across VALORANT, League of Legends, TFT and R&D projects. Naming the MMO, and hanging specific teams and reporting lines off it, is the new part.
Los Angeles is hiring for the same game and saying so in public. On August 3, 2026, Riot MMO senior engineering manager Orlando Salvatore (@KirbyAu) recruited a Los Angeles-based Principal Software Engineer, Rendering for "the League MMO," describing the work as "Building engine tech from the ground up, keeping performance in check at MMO scale." It is the second Riot job ad this week to say more about this game than Riot has, after the engineer hired to architect its in-game store.
The Listings
Three teams, three reporting lines, and one bullet about AI that the listing never explains.
01 Automation & Release Systems
REQ-0009863 (Manager, Software Engineering) and REQ-0010038 (Staff Software Engineer) staff the same team. Between them they describe a manager leading "a team of 2-6 engineers", build automation running across "a distributed network of servers", and an engineer who will "Troubleshoot live service issues as part of an on-call rotation." Both are Sydney-based, and REQ-0010038 is the listing carrying the relocation and visa-sponsorship offer.
02 Tools & Pipeline, technical art
REQ-0009985 wants a Senior Technical Artist for a "Sydney-based team [that] is partnering globally to build next-generation features and technology on an exciting Unpublished R&D Title." The scope is every art discipline at once: "Character Art, Animation, Environment Art, Audio, and VFX", serving "multiple teams in parallel production streams." Required: Unreal Engine 5, Python, PySide/PyQt. The role reports to a Manager, Technical Art and works with a Technical Art Director, so a technical-art org already exists above it.
03 Engine & Tools, and the AI line
REQ-0010166 sits on a Tech Foundations team and is the one people will argue about. The hire "will be responsible for designing and implementing AI/ML driven tools and features." One responsibility reads "Lead the application of AI/ML systems to solve developer and player facing problems." Another is to "Partner with central teams to share AI-based solutions across Riot's portfolio." Riot has not said what the player-facing half of that sentence covers.
- All four roles are listed as "Unpublished R&D Product" and based in Sydney, Australia: REQ-0009863, REQ-0010038, REQ-0009985 and REQ-0010166.
- Unreal Engine experience is a stated requirement in three of the four listings, and the technical-art role names Unreal Engine 5 specifically.
- Riot Sydney was formed in 2022 out of Riot's acquisition of the team at Wargaming Sydney, and Riot's careers material describes it as working across VALORANT, League of Legends, TFT and R&D projects.
- Orlando Salvatore's August 3, 2026 recruiting post for a Los Angeles Principal Software Engineer, Rendering names "the League MMO" directly.
- These are job listings and a recruiting post. They are official Riot documents. They are not a development update, a roadmap, or a release-window statement.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Build automation, release engineering and an artist tools pipeline are what a project needs when it has to ship builds every day.
This is the Riot MMO described by Riot, which makes it rarer than most MMO news. What it describes is not one room in Los Angeles. There is a second hub on the other side of the Pacific with its own engineering manager, its own Automation & Release Systems team and its own technical-art chain of command, and Riot is covering relocation and visa costs to fill it.
The disciplines say more than the titles do: build automation across a distributed network of servers, an artist tools pipeline serving multiple teams in parallel, and an on-call rotation for live-service issues. None of that is glamorous, and all of it is what a project stands up when it has to produce and validate builds continuously rather than occasionally. You don't build an on-call rotation for a prototype.
You don't build an on-call rotation for a prototype.
Release discipline is also what keeps internal work internal. The alternative is public and expensive, the way it was when a debug spell surfaced in a live WoW combat log and Blizzard fired the employee who cast it. That is a release-pipeline story before it is a personnel story, and it is the class of failure an Automation & Release Systems team exists to make impossible.
The AI bullet deserves a narrow reading rather than a loud one. REQ-0010166 is overwhelmingly a developer-tooling role: engine work, build tools, systems other engineers use. Riot still chose to write "developer and player facing problems" into an MMO job ad and left the player-facing half undefined. That is the first hint we have of AI touching anything players see on this project, and the wording is loose enough that it will be read far harder than the listing supports.
- Co-development across two studios and two time zones is how Riot already runs League and VALORANT. On the org chart this looks like a mainline title, not an R&D side project.
- "Multiple teams in parallel production streams" means content teams working at the same time, which only happens once the pipeline under them is finished enough to trust.
- An Automation & Release Systems team with an on-call rotation is infrastructure for continuous builds and, eventually, live service.
- Unreal turns up again from the Sydney side, with Unreal Engine 5 named in the technical-art requirements.
- Relocation plus visa sponsorship is what you pay when the specialists you want are not already in the city.
- What none of it tells you: when this ships, how big it is, what it costs, or what you actually do in it.
| On the record | Riot Sydney | Riot Los Angeles |
|---|---|---|
| How we know | Four public job listings, one naming the MMO in Riot's own copy | A public recruiting post from senior engineering manager Orlando Salvatore |
| What is being hired | Build automation, release systems, technical art tools, engine and AI/ML tooling | Principal Software Engineer, Rendering |
| Reporting lines named | Engineering Manager, Automation & Release Systems, Manager of Technical Art, Technical Art Director | Not revealed |
| Relocation offered | Comprehensive relocation assistance and work-visa sponsorship | Not revealed |
| Engine | Unreal Engine in three of the four listings, Unreal Engine 5 in the technical-art role | Engine tech built from the ground up, per the post |
| Launch window, scope, platform | Not revealed | Not revealed |
All of that plumbing exists to render one thing: Runeterra. That is the single confirmed fact about this game. Which regions are in it, how much of the map you can walk, what era it sits in, what it runs on and how it makes money are all unrevealed, and these listings reveal none of it.
What they do show is the surface area one tools pipeline has to serve. "Character Art, Animation, Environment Art, Audio, and VFX" is every discipline Riot has spent a decade pointing at this world. A cinematic is not a game build, so read the clip below as the art bar Riot sets for this world, not as a preview of anything.
Our own atlas is a fair proxy for the size of the job. Ionia alone carries dozens of mapped sites, from the Placidium of Navori to the Kinkou Monastery, while Piltover's Hexgates and Zaun's Sump share one canyon, one of them far beneath the other, and run on opposite rules.
The fiction has already done a lot of systems design for free, too. Demacia's ban on magic produced a crafting material that stores the magic it outlaws, and Noxus built its capital around a machine that collects its dead. Both read like quest and crafting design somebody else already wrote down.
Those crests are the world Riot draws on, not a launch map. Which of these regions the MMO uses, and how much of that map you will ever stand on, has not been announced.
Your Take
Does a second MMO studio in Sydney make you more confident the Riot MMO is genuinely in production?
What to Watch
Riot has named the project in recruiting copy and nowhere else, so hiring is still the only public signal.
The next real signal is not another req. It is Riot putting a name, a date, or one frame of footage on this game. Until then the org chart is the news, and it keeps growing.
Reported from Riot Games Careers and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
