Senior Manager of Platform Engineering, Crunchyroll
$235-285k
More information about location
3 days a week in office
Streaming service for anime and manga
Be an early applicant
Streaming service for anime and manga
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$235-285k
More information about location
3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To create experiences for anime and manga fans, and to enable them to connect through the content they love.
Role
Who you are
- You have 10+ years of experience building and operating cloud-native backend or platform services at scale, and 4+ years of experience managing engineering teams
- You have deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (preferably AWS) and modern application architectures (microservices, event-driven systems), including APIs, queues, and data stores
- You are proficient in one or more backend programming languages (such as TypeScript, Go, Java, or Python) and can meaningfully review designs and code with your team
- You have led teams responsible for authentication, identity, authorization, notifications, or similar consumer access domains, with a strong understanding of security, fraud, and trust considerations
- You are comfortable partnering on compliance and data protection topics (e.g., GDPR/DSAR, data retention, age assurance) and integrating technical systems with policy and regulatory requirements
- You have experience working with or around AI/ML production systems—such as inference runtimes, model deployment, or ML-powered risk/scoring systems—or are eager to learn and partner closely with ML/AI teams in this area
- You can synthesize complex tradeoffs for technical and non-technical audiences, and build trust across teams and time zones
What the job involves
- The Platform Development organization powers Crunchyroll's core access and security platform
- This platform includes authentication and authorization, notifications, and AI runtimes. It enables other teams to safely build fan-facing features on top of a stable, compliant, and leverageable foundation
- The team's mission is to provide reliable, secure fan access across devices and partners, integrate access services with data and compliance orchestration, and evolve notifications and AI inference into reusable platform capabilities that accelerate product and partner launches
- We collaborate with product, data, security, client engineering, video, and service monetization teams to deliver seamless and secure experiences for millions of anime fans worldwide
- As the Senior Manager of Platform Development, you will report to the VP of Platform Engineering
- You will lead a team of software engineers building and operating the core services that govern how fans access Crunchyroll
- These services include login, identity, authorization, partner authentication, compliance-aware account flows, notifications, and AI runtimes
- You will own the team's strategy and execution, guiding the decomposition of legacy authentication and IAM into clearer, safer platform services, stabilizing and evolving our notification stack toward a unified orchestration layer, and working with our data team to layer the foundations of a shared AI inference platform
- You will lean on your engineering and leadership experience to raise the bar on architecture, reliability, security, and delivery, while hiring and developing a high-performing, inclusive team aligned to Crunchyroll's values
- Team leadership and people management:
- Lead, coach, and grow a team of software engineers, providing clear expectations, feedback, and career development aligned with Crunchyroll's engineering manager career ladder
- Hire and onboard diverse talent, build an inclusive team culture, and set a high bar for engineering quality, ownership, and collaboration
- Domain ownership: access, notifications, and AI runtimes:
- Own the roadmap and execution for Platform Development's core domains: authentication and identity, authorization, notifications, and AI runtimes, ensuring these services are reliable, secure, and easy for other teams to adopt
- Partner with Data and security teams to integrate access services with compliance orchestration for GDPR/DSAR and age-assurance requirements, including data wipe/anonymization and age-based access controls in key markets
- Define and maintain SLOs, on-call practices, and incident response workflows for your services, in partnership with SRE/DevOps and Engineering Operations
- Platform architecture and modernization:
- Lead the decomposition of existing account-auth and IAM systems into well-bounded services (core auth, client policies, consent, risk/security), laying the groundwork for future capabilities like passkeys, social login, and targeted friction models
- Guide the evolution of notifications from legacy systems toward a modern, observable Universal Notification Orchestrator, starting with critical flows such as OTP and security/compliance messaging
- Collaborate with Data and AI/ML teams to define the vision and reference architecture for a shared AI inference platform, supporting multi-model serving, observability, and cost management for risk, security, and experience optimization use cases
- Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management:
- Work closely with product management, program management, and partner teams to translate fan and business outcomes into a clear, prioritized roadmap for Platform Development
- Partner with client, video, and partner engineering to improve authentication success, account linking flows, and time-to-first-play across distribution channels and devices
- Communicate status, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to senior leadership, ensuring alignment on priorities and visible impact to fan experience, regulatory posture, and platform leverage
- Operational excellence and continuous improvement:
- Ensure your team designs for observability, security, and operability, embedding testing, monitoring, alerting, and runbooks into all critical services
- Use incident and operational data to drive learning and durable improvements, in partnership with SRE and Engineering Operations (RCA, standards, and best practices)
- Contribute to and adopt shared engineering practices across Platform Engineering, including multi-account AWS patterns, GitHub security, and self-service infrastructure and deployment workflows
Our take
In recent decades, anime - encompassing Japanese, Korean, and Chinese animation 0 has transitioned from a niche interest to a formidable industry, boasting a global market worth approximately $30B. Despite this growth, distribution has historically posed challenges, with series and films often reaching overseas audiences through disparate channels, if at all. Crunchyroll emerged to address this issue by consolidating the largest collection of anime into a single streaming service.
Sony's acquisition of Crunchyroll in 2021 for $1.75B expanded the platform's reach, integrating Sony's extensive animation library into its offerings. this move also positioned Crunchyroll for heightened competition against streaming giant Netflix, known for its substantial investments in anime production and acquisition. Currently, Crunchyroll maintains an unrivaled library of anime content, boasting over 44,000 episodes that have attracted over 0M paying subscribers.
While Crunchyroll initially offered a free, ad-supported tier to its vast community, it appears poised to phase out this option, transitioning to a subscription-based model for all new series. Despite this shift, the platform has implemented a global reduction in fees to stimulate subscription uptake. The success of this strategy remains to be seen, but past experiences with companies like Hulu suggest that it may drive subscription growth and mitigate piracy
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Mar 2010
$0.8m
EARLY VC
Feb 2008
$4.1m
SERIES A
Total funding: $4.9m
Company benefits
- Receive a great compensation package including salary plus performance bonus earning potential, paid annually
- Flexible time off policies allowing you to take the time you need to be your whole self
- Generous medical, dental, vision, STD, LTD, and life insurance
- Health Saving Account HSA program
- Health care and dependent care FSA
- 401(k) plan, with employer match
- Employer paid commuter benefit
- Support program for new parents
- Pet insurance and some of our offices are pet friendly!
Company HQ
Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, CA
Leadership
Kun Gao
(Co-Founder & CEO)Co-founded Crunchyroll in 2006 and served as CEO/General Manager/Board Member until 2018. Previously the founder and CTO of Frappr.com as well as a Product Engineer at HOT or NOT.
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