Israel Knight
Principal Software Engineer AI Machine Learning at Riot Games
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIsrael Knight is a Principal Software Engineer specializing in AI and machine learning with 11+ years of experience building large-scale data, ML, and distributed systems for games and consumer products. He leads Riot Games’ Game Studios Data initiative, driving MLOps, large-scale topic modeling, clustering, and distributed reinforcement learning while previously founding and scaling data engineering teams across multiple titles. Earlier roles as Director of Software Engineering at adidas show his ability to combine product vision, ML enablement, telemetry, and infrastructure-as-code to deliver highly available, data-driven mobile experiences. Israel pairs deep hands-on expertise across Python, JavaScript, Java, cloud platforms, and ML frameworks with a knack for rapidly learning and operationalizing new technologies. He’s delivered measurable business impact—ranging from doubling revenue through data-driven optimization to shipping ML-driven hardware projects—and has a long history of cross-disciplinary R&D, from Google Glass prototypes to terabyte-scale content delivery. Based in Washington, DC, he blends technical leadership, team building, and sustained execution to turn experimental research into production-grade systems.
11 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science B.S. Mathematics B.A., Computer Science B.S. Mathematics B.A. at Union Adventist UniversityMachine Learning Nanodegree Program, Machine Learning Nanodegree Program at UdacityUpper division classes Computer Science, Upper division classes Computer Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Github Skills (29)
apache-airflow10
data-pipelines10
monitor10
python10
data-science10
data-engineering10
machine-learning10
workflow-engine10
apache10
scheduler10
etl10
automation10
dag10
mlops10
airflow10
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
isknight/incubator-airflow
Aug 2018 - Sep 2018
Apache Airflow (Incubating)
Contributions:2 PRs, 6 pushes, 2 branches in 12 days
incubatingemrapachebig-dataspark
isknight/udacity-machine-learning
Apr 2017 - Dec 2017
Contributions:4 pushes, 1 branch in 8 months
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