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Sebastian Zangaro

@sebastianzangaro

Message

I lead teams building real-time player safety systems for VALORANT.

United States

Message

At Riot Games, I lead VALORANT Player Dynamics, building client, backend, and data systems that detect and mitigate player abuse for a global competitive game serving approximately 40 million monthly active players.

I own technical planning, roadmaps, execution, hiring, and mentoring across a distributed team in Sydney and the US. My team operates five Go microservices with Kafka-based real-time processing, and I built a TPM-based client attestation system to reduce identity spoofing at scale.

Previously, I led data engineering at Riot, Quibi, and NextVR, building real-time pipelines, backend services, data observability practices, and distributed data architectures across streaming, gaming, and customer platforms.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Engineering Manager, VALORANT Player Dynamics

Current

Riot Games

Aug 2022 - Present (4 years)

Leads the VALORANT Player Dynamics engineering team, building client, backend, and data systems to detect and mitigate player abuse and misconduct for a global competitive game. Owns technical planning, roadmap prioritization, engineering execution, hiring, mentoring, and cross-functional delivery.

Go Kafka Distributed Systems Microservices Backend Data Observability Trust and Safety Abuse detection Enforcement Systems Reporting Engineering Management Hiring Mentor

Lead Data Engineer, Central Data Organization

Riot Games

Jan 2021 - Aug 2022 (1 year 7 months)

Led the Cross Product vertical in Riot's Data organization, defining data engineering standards, pipeline architecture, and quality practices across five teams. Built Go APIs and Apache Spark pipelines for real-time player data processing and architected a Riot-wide data observability initiative.

Go Apache Spark Data Engineering Data Pipelines Data Quality Data Observability Monitoring Alerting

Lead Data Engineer

Quibi

Aug 2019 - Jan 2021 (1 year 5 months)

Designed and built real-time and batch data pipelines supporting a mobile-first streaming platform, using Apache Beam, BigQuery, and dbt. Built data integrations across customer data, marketing automation, attribution, experimentation, and audience engagement platforms.

Apache Beam BigQuery DBT Data Pipelines Data Integration Marketing Automation Attribution Experimentation Behavioral Analytics

Lead Data Engineer

NextVR

May 2018 - Aug 2019 (1 year 3 months)

Designed and built backend services and real-time data pipelines supporting a live VR streaming platform, using Go, Kafka, Apache Airflow, and Apache Druid. Led migration of the content-management data layer from MongoDB to CockroachDB.

Go Kafka Airflow Apache Druid MongoDB CockroachDB Data Pipelines Real Time Streaming Data

Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead

Organizer

Apr 2017 - May 2018 (1 year 1 month)

Led backend engineering for large-scale canvassing and political messaging platforms supporting distributed field operations. Designed and built Java and Python microservices on Google Cloud Platform and data pipelines in BigQuery.

Java Python Google Cloud Platform BigQuery Microservices Data Pipelines Backend Engineering API Design

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Universidad Católica del Uruguay

Master of Science, Computer Science

Master of Science in Computer Science with a thesis on quantum computing programming, exploring quantum algorithms from a computer science perspective.