Shadow Animation Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Your Mission

Call of Duty is one of the most iconic and successful video game franchises in the world, delivering unforgettable experiences to millions of players every day. At the heart of that experience is fair play-and that's where the Ricochet Anti-Cheat team comes in.

Our mission is to detect and eliminate cheating quickly and at scale, ensuring every player enjoys a level playing field. As a Senior Data Reliability Engineer, you will play a critical role in building and operating the data systems that power Call of Duty Anti-Cheat, processing petabytes of game telemetry with high reliability, integrity, and trust.

What you bring to the table

You will design, deploy, and operate large-scale, reliable data systems that support telemetry ingestion, enrichment, and analytics for Anti-Cheat. Working closely with Machine Learning, Security, and Game Engineering teams, you'll help enable automated data pipelines-from ingest to insight-that directly inform anti-cheat actions in production.

This role blends data engineering, reliability engineering, and operational excellence. You'll define GitOps-based workflows for securely deploying data pipelines and application stacks, build deep observability into everything you own, and ensure the accuracy and validity of data that Anti-Cheat systems depend on.

Priorities can often change in a fast-paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:

• Create the ML Data pipeline used for our models including building the ML templates that are used, the observability of our models, the metrics and KPIs used to monitor their efficacy, and the automated retraining required as the data drifts.
• Design and operate large-scale, highly-available data pipelines and platforms for high-volume game telemetry
• Ensure the integrity, trustworthiness, and quality of Anti-Cheat data
• Partner closely with Machine Learning teams to support batch, streaming, online inference workflows, automated testing of ML artifacts, and observability and maintenance of automated deployment pipelines
• Define and maintain GitOps workflows for secure, automated testing, integration, and deployment
• Build comprehensive observability (metrics, logs, dashboards, alerts) into data pipelines and services
• Own operational excellence, including incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortems
• Contribute to deployment and release strategies such as canary, blue/green, and shadow deployments

Player Profile

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of programming experience
• Extensive experience working in Python; familiarity with Go
• Strong experience with data technologies such as SQL, Spark, and Airflow
• Hands-on experience building observability systems using tools like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana
• Experience with dashboarding and alerting for production systems
• Secure automation of testing and deployments using GitHub Actions / Workflows (GitOps)
• Experience with Linux system administration in production environments
• Cloud-native deployment experience using Kubernetes, Helm, and ArgoCD
• Experience supporting model deployments (batch and online APIs); bonus for streaming or near-real-time systems

Knowledge & Skills

• Master's degree or equivalent professional experience in Data Engineering, Data Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field
• Familiarity with production release strategies including canary, blue/green, and shadow deployments

Key Attributes

• Ability to communicate clearly with both engineers and non-technical partners, translating ambiguous needs into actionable technical designs

Extra Points

Experience

• Experience coding in Rust
• Experience with incident response and operational ownership, including leading post-mortems
• Cloud networking experience in Azure

Knowledge and Skills

• Background in security, anti-abuse, or anti-cheat data systems
• Production experience with deep learning systems, including model serving, optimization, monitoring, and retraining triggers

Your Platform

Activision Central Tech works to support our development studios and their titles. Comprised of seven main teams, we have many specialties including big data, privacy and security, motion capture and animation pipeline technologies, graphics, build and infrastructure for studio development and data centers, optimization, systems programming and online services including matchmaking and networking. Central Tech is distributed globally with offices across the U.S., and in Canada, England, and Ireland.

Most of our teams are comprised of both engineering and research talent, allowing us to always have an eye on the future. Our dedicated engineers help with title development and provide valuable knowledge sharing between studios while our researchers are action-oriented and keep a strong connection with the needs of the game studios.

Central Tech is part of Activision. To learn more about us and our research, please visit us at https://research.activision.com/.

Our World

At Activision, we strive to create the most iconic brands in gaming and entertainment. We're driven by our mission to deliver unrivaled gaming experiences for the world to enjoy, together. We are home to some of the most beloved entertainment franchises including Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Guitar Hero. As a leading worldwide developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and products, our "press start" is simple: delight hundreds of millions of players around the world with innovative, fun, thrilling, and engaging entertainment experiences.

We're not just looking back at our decades-long legacy; we're forging ahead to keep advancing gameplay with some of the most popular titles and sophisticated technology in the world. We have bold ambitions to create the most inclusive company as we know our success comes from the passionate, creative, and diverse teams within our organization.

We're in the business of delivering fun and unforgettable entertainment for our player community to enjoy. And our future opportunities have never been greater - this could be your opportunity to level up.

Ready to Activate Your Future?

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, among other characteristics.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable assistance to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you are a disabled individual requiring an accommodation to apply for an open position, please email your request to accommodationrequests@activisionblizzard.com. General employment questions cannot be accepted or processed here. Thank you for your interest.

Rewards

We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for 'Every World' - we've got our employees covered! Subject to eligibility requirements, the Company offers comprehensive benefits including:

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;
• If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.

Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part time and temporary full-time employees and interns with the Company. You can learn more by visiting https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/.