Francis J Nickels III

Francis J. Nickels III

Francis J Nickels III

Director of Operations

Riot Games

Santa Monica, CA

Francis.Nickels@gmail.com

 

Francis joined Riot Games in 2010 as the Director of Operations and has helped build teams and the global compute and network infrastructure for the company’s flagship online game, League of Legends.  Over the past ten years his focus has been on global, high availability technology infrastructure and applications in a variety of business domains.  Some of the companies he has previously worked at include Blizzard Entertainment, Roll Global, and Experian.

Francis graduated from UCLA in 1986 with a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, and also served as the Chief Information Officer in the Chancellor’s Office at UCLA from 2003 to 2005.

Right out of college he took a unique role as the first software engineer on a manufacturing engineering team at Teradyne Inc., working to automate physical build processes for VLSI test equipment.  He later went on to found and run a technology consulting practice where he developed and managed technology projects for a range of businesses, including Ashton-Tate, City National Bank, East West Bank, Synapse Technologies, and Teradyne. In 2000, he gave up his consulting practice to join one of his clients Spiderdance Inc., an interactive TV startup, as their VP of Operations.