Lyon senior scores job with Riot Games
BATESVILLE — Riot Games has offered Lyon senior Zach Ward a job before he even graduates. Ward, of Russellville, will work as an associate software engineer for the video-game developer in California.
“I’m very excited,” he said. “It took a weight off my shoulders that I didn’t fully know was there.”
Ward first became familiar with Riot Games through a summer internship from late June to early August. He worked for a data-engineering team of about 20 people who focused on multigame data analysis. While the company’s premier game is League of Legends, he said, Riot Games is “a multigame studio.”
“Our job was to find how we could analyze these games compared to each other,” Ward said, “but also provide deeper analysis into the games themselves.”
The team tried to collect data in a way that could be used to make better-informed business decisions, he said.
“With most fields, you don’t really get to do research as part of your daily job,” Ward said. “A lot of that is segmented off to the academic side of every field.
“With tech, it’s not really like that. We’re doing research and development every day. That’s something I’m really looking forward to with the job.”
When he starts his new job after graduation, Ward will get to work with the same team from his internship.
“I had done work previously as a solo developer, so it was a new experience to work as a team,” he said. “I really enjoyed that.”
Before his summer internship, Ward had assumed he would attend graduate school after graduating from Lyon. He had wanted to work for a game company when he was younger but never expected that he would make that dream a reality.
“Honestly, I found the internship on a whim,” he said. “I had wondered if [Riot Games] had summer opportunities and found out they did.”
Ward worked with the Lyon College Career Center and faculty on interviews, essays and recommendations for the internship.