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Team Building @ Riot

Back in early July 2015, on a uniquely dry Thursday evening, the Riot InfoSec team ran a small meet-up at our new Dublin office as I previously mentioned here.



The goal of the event was to engage with the local security community, several of whom are also huge League players as I noticed by negative KDA :'( My main memories of the gaming that night being constantly head-butted away by 60 minute Alistair (also spamming his heal) and an extremely fed, axe-wielding and catching Draven, killing at will.

As a team, we felt that the event went well and it seems to have been well received by those who attended. My talk was about the lessons that I have learned from hiring a team into Riot Engineering, which is the first time I've ever had the opportunity to build a team from scratch. It's not only be incredibly educational and exciting, but also humbling as I've had phenomenal support from so many folk in both the Dublin and LA :)



Given there's probably quite a bit of context missing from my talk (if you only look at the slides here) followed the format below:

  • Who I am and who Riot Games are
  • Set context on Riot, League of Legends and the security challenges we face
  • Levelling up the team
    • How I went about it
    • What mistakes I made
    • How I learned
    • That "exciting" feeling when you interview a game-changer
    • How we've improved the process and continue to improve through
      • being data-informed
      • conscious of bias
      • training
      • incorporating practical elements
    • Team (alignment)
In addition to the presentations, we also showed off some tools that we've written to help raise that security bar.



Given we are a diverse team, split across multiple countries and timezones, with different backgrounds, alignment is a challenge because we are all ultimately remoties. As a result, we are always thinking of how we can improve in terms of communication, collaboration and yes, alignment. We took the opportunity with the open-evening event to bring over many of our North America-based InfoSec team to

  • hang out for the week
  • deliver some cool awareness and social hacking presentations to the Riot Dublin office
  • build a lego deathstar (yes, a deathstar :) )

Sadly, one of our Darth figures was stolen and taken back to St Louis by a malicious insider :(




All feedback on the slides is greatly appreciated.

Hopefully the next meet-up will be in early 2016. If there's anything in particular you'd like to hear about at the next meet-up, let us know (@markofu or @davidrook).

If you want to help level the team up, we're still hiring (multiple locations), so please reach out!!!
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