Source: Riot Games Careers, job 8187637, read against the public Greenhouse board on September 15. Verified against multiple sources; datamines and reports are labelled as such, not stated as fact.
The Job
Riot's public careers board gained a Senior UX Designer listing on September 14, the newest opening at the studio building its unannounced game.
An MMO is a world plus the screens you reach it through: a bag, a map, a store, a friends list. On September 14 Riot posted the job of designing those screens.
The listing is a Senior UX Designer role based in Sydney, Australia's largest city and the site of a Riot office. Its department field reads Riot Discovery Studio, the name Riot attaches to the team building its unannounced game. That game is set in Runeterra, the fictional world of League of Legends, Riot's free team-battle game, and the setting is the only thing about the project Riot has confirmed.
It is the newest listing that studio has, on a public board carrying 152 open jobs. The studio has 19 of them. Seven sit in Sydney, and until this week every one of those seven was engineering or art: five software engineering roles and one art manager. This is the first design job among them.
Own UX design for significant player-facing features and systems from early discovery through implementation and iteration.
— Riot Games, Senior UX Designer listing 8187637, first published September 14 2026, the listing
One caveat, and it is the kind that gets skipped. This listing is not tagged as an MMO role. Its product field reads Development Studios, and exactly 3 of the 152 open jobs carry the MMO tag instead. Two of those 3 are Sydney build-systems roles under the same department, and they say it in their own body copy: one calls the project a highly anticipated Riot MMO, the other says on our unpublished MMO. So the MMO read on the design job comes from the shared studio, not from anything Riot wrote on this ad.
Riot executive producer Fabrice Condominas, who leads the MMO, visited both offices in June. He thanked them for the hospitality on June 26 and framed the work as one job split across time zones.
The listing also carries No Relocation, so Riot wants somebody already working in the country. That is not a signal about this job in particular. Every Sydney listing on the board reads the same way, including the two tagged MMO, so it is a local default rather than a change.
The Brief
The ad names Figma, journey maps and wireframes as the work, and lists Unreal Engine familiarity, playtesting and multiplatform experience as nice to have.
The ad is specific about what the hire owns. Responsibilities run from owning the design of significant player-facing features and systems through to partnering with engineering during implementation, and the artifacts are listed by name: journey maps, flows, wireframes, mockups, prototypes and implementation documentation. The hire reports to a Senior Design Leader supporting the R&D Game Team.
Required: six or more years as a UX, interaction or product designer, proven end-to-end ownership of complex features, and a portfolio. Figma, the browser-based interface design tool most product teams work in, is named outright, for design systems, prototyping and communicating implementation intent.
The desired list is where the reading happens. It asks for familiarity with Unreal Engine or other game development tools for implementation and prototyping, for experience with user research, usability testing, playtesting and analytics, for multiplatform work, and for experience on distributed or cross-studio teams. That last one is the least glamorous and the most telling: this hire is expected to design with people in other buildings and other time zones.
Two of those lines will get read too hard, so here is the limit on them. Unreal Engine, the commercial game engine Epic Games licenses to other studios, appears again in a Riot Discovery Studio ad, and it sits under desired rather than required. The word multiplatform appears twice, once in the responsibilities and once in the desired qualifications. Neither line is Riot saying what this game runs on. Riot has not revealed the platforms, and a company that already ships on phones and consoles would ask a senior designer about platform experience whatever it was building.
The Board
Sydney hired engineering and art first, and a July engineering ad for social and store systems already named UX Design as its partner.
The Sydney group filled up in a readable order. The oldest listing still open there went up in July 2025. The two build-systems roles followed on March 17 and May 28 of this year, a technical art manager on June 19, and two more engineers on July 31, one on engine and tools and one on social and store. The design job landed on September 14.
March 17
Manager, Automation and Build Systems
Tagged MMO. Its copy says on our unpublished MMO.
May 28
Staff Engineer, Automation and Build Systems
Tagged MMO. Its copy calls the project a highly anticipated Riot MMO.
June 19
Technical Art Manager
The only art role in the Sydney group.
July 31
Engine and Tools, plus Social and Store
Two engineering listings posted the same day.
September 14
Senior UX Designer
The first design role in the group.
The July 31 pair is the part worth stopping on. One of them is a staff engineer for social and store systems, and its copy says the hire will architect the foundational social and store systems and work closely with leadership, Product, and UX Design to set the long-term technical vision for engaging social and purchasing systems.
A friends list and a shop are as player-facing as software gets. An engineer was hired to build the plumbing for both in July. The person who decides what they look like was posted in September. That order is ordinary. It also puts the interface work after the plumbing rather than in front of it.
An engineer was hired to build the plumbing for both in July. The person who decides what they look like was posted in September.
Craft by craft is how this studio staffs. We covered the rendering role that asks for Nanite and makes MMO experience a hard requirement, and the animator hired to decide how running feels. The count itself was a story a week ago, when nineteen live ads turned up under the Riot Discovery Studio name.
Riot staff post these openings themselves, which is how the tech stack keeps leaking. Riot senior engineering manager Orlando Salvatore advertised a principal rendering engineer on August 3 for what he called the 'League MMO', and Alex Lehmann, a director on the same research and development team, advertised a senior technical animator in April, asking for people who could make the characters of Runeterra come to life.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
A studio hires somebody to own player-facing systems when the systems exist, and Runeterra is still the only thing Riot has confirmed about this game.
Our read, and it is speculative: you hire somebody to own player-facing systems when there are player-facing systems to own. The engine work, the build systems and the tools come first, because nothing runs without them. Interfaces come when there is something behind the interface. A senior designer whose whole job is what the player touches is a build-state signal in a way that a fifth engineer is not.
Hold that loosely. A studio can also hire a discipline years early to get the practice right before it matters, and the ad itself asks the hire to raise the quality of UX practice on the team. Riot has not said this person works on the MMO, and the listing is not tagged as one.
What is not speculative is the material. Runeterra runs to thirteen regions in our own Atlas, and their logic does not transfer between them. Each one is a separate interface problem. Piltover is the city of progress, and its Hexgates are hextech gateways that move goods and people across long distances in a single step, which is fast travel with a lore reason already attached. Directly beneath it is Zaun, the chem-fumed undercity, where the Sump is the lowest and most polluted level and the air itself has a texture.
Commerce has a place too. The Boundary Markets sit on the border between the two cities, where Piltovan luxury goods share stall space with Zaunite chemtech contraband. Up north in the Freljord, the frozen tribal north, the Howling Abyss is a vast frozen bridge over a bottomless chasm with the Watchers, Void entities, sealed in True Ice beneath it. A shop, a transit network and a sealed prison under a bridge. The fiction wrote all of that before anybody drew a screen for it.
That map is the world Riot draws on, not a launch plan. Which regions the game opens with, how much of the map it covers, how big it is, what era it sits in, what it runs on and what it costs are all unrevealed. Anybody telling you otherwise is guessing, and the crests above illustrate the fiction rather than a starting area.
| Side by side | What the listing says | What Riot has confirmed |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | The product is only ever called an Unpublished R&D Product | Runeterra |
| Engine | Familiarity with Unreal Engine, listed as desired, not required | Not revealed |
| Platforms | Consider platform and multiplatform needs | Not revealed |
| Regions and scope | Nothing | Not revealed |
| Release and price | Nothing | Not revealed |
Here is the design problem in one video. Awaken, Riot's Season 2019 cinematic, cuts between places that share nothing except a world, and it is three minutes of exactly what a single interface would have to hold together.
It is built around an invasion. In Ionia, the spirit-touched islands where the material and spirit worlds bleed into each other, a blade dancer named Irelia leads a resistance of farmers, monks and one disgraced swordsman, and they fight in green valleys full of drifting light.
Noxus, the expansionist empire doing the invading, answers with an arena. Its crowd watches an executioner named Draven throw axes for sport while a reanimated giant walks the front line somewhere else entirely. And nowhere near either of them, Camille, an augmented enforcer working for one of Piltover's ruling clans, hunts somebody across the rooftops.
Three combat languages, three environments, three sets of rules, one game. Somebody has to design a bag and a map that work in all of them without shipping three different answers.
Three combat languages, three environments, three sets of rules, one game.
- A senior designer who owns player-facing features implies features that need a face, not engine and pipeline work.
- A July engineering ad for social and store systems already named UX Design as its partner, so the interface work was scheduled before the designer was advertised.
- Unreal Engine turns up again in a Riot Discovery Studio ad, under desired qualifications rather than required.
- Only 3 of 152 listings carry the MMO tag. The studio label is doing the work here, so read the whole tie as inference.
The wider signal is that Riot is talking about this game again without announcing anything. Its own account posted Riot co-founder Marc Merrill on stage about chasing the grail on September 5, and that 39-second clip passed 7 million views. Condominas quote-posted it 28 minutes later with a single line: the project is not for the faint of heart.
Riot argues about design in public, and the arguments are worth reading next to this ad. Its lead gameplay designer said a week ago that League of Legends needs the right amount of frustration to survive, which is a claim about what a screen shows you as much as about balance. The analytics line in this ad points at a live-service argument too: we wrote about Riot shutting off the data pipe for its newest mode, and an MMO makes that argument permanent.
None of this tells you when the game ships, where in the world it starts, how much of Runeterra is in it, what it runs on or what it costs. Riot has revealed none of that. What it does tell you is that a team in Sydney is now hiring somebody to decide what the player actually sees, and that is a different phase of work from the one the board was showing in March.
Your Take
Does a senior UX hire mean Riot's MMO now has real features to put an interface on?
What to Watch
Three more RuneGrove reads on the studio, its engineering hires and what Riot has said out loud.
Reported from Riot Games Careers and the public Greenhouse board, with the posts embedded above. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
