Director of Lifecycle Technology & Operations, Crunchyroll
$195-205k
Plus performance bonus earning potential, paid annually
Braze
Expert level
Los Angeles
3 days a week in office
Streaming service for anime and manga
Be an early applicant
Streaming service for anime and manga
1001+ employees
B2CEntertainmentSaaSVideo
Be an early applicant
$195-205k
Plus performance bonus earning potential, paid annually
Braze
Expert level
Los Angeles
3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
B2CEntertainmentSaaSVideo
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
- 12+ years of experience across Lifecycle Marketing Operations, CRM Operations, Marketing Technology, Marketing Operations, customer engagement platforms, or related disciplines within a scaled consumer business
- 5+ years of experience leading teams, complex marketing operations, or technical marketing programs, including management of internal and external resources
- Demonstrated experience leading Lifecycle, CRM, Martech, or marketing operations across multiple regions and markets, including building global capabilities that support localization, regional requirements, and market-specific execution
- Deep experience with Braze or a comparable customer engagement and orchestration platform, including journey orchestration, segmentation, behavioral triggers, personalization, experimentation, and multi-channel execution
- Experience serving as a platform owner, senior business stakeholder, or highly technical operator responsible for how a customer engagement or marketing automation platform is configured, governed, used, and evolved
- Strong technical fluency across customer data architecture, events, attributes, audiences, APIs, integrations, data pipelines, identity, and data-quality monitoring
- Demonstrated ability to translate customer and marketing needs into technical requirements, platform capabilities, roadmaps, and scalable solutions
- Experience partnering closely with MarTech, Product, Engineering, Data Engineering, Analytics, Marketing, and regional teams to deliver new customer-facing and operational capabilities
- Proven experience designing and improving global operating models, including intake, prioritization, resource and capacity management, QA, governance, deployment, and incident management
- Experience managing agencies, offshore teams, vendors, budgets, and technology or platform investments
- Strong understanding of customer-contact governance, deliverability, suppression logic, consent and preference management, privacy, and operational risk across complex markets
- Demonstrated success advancing personalization, automation, experimentation, decisioning, or real-time customer engagement capabilities
- Ability to move comfortably between marketing, operational, data, and technical conversations and translate complex concepts for different audiences
- Strong cross-functional leadership, influencing, program management, and problem-solving skills within complex, matrixed, global organizations
- Experience within streaming, subscription, entertainment, gaming, ecommerce, media, or another high-volume digital consumer business is strongly preferred
- Experience applying AI or emerging marketing technologies to improve scale, efficiency, or customer experience is strongly preferred
- Passion for anime, entertainment, or fandom-driven businesses is a plus
What the job involves
- As the Director, Lifecycle Technology & Operations, you will lead the global operating model and technical foundation that enables Lifecycle Marketing to deliver personalized, data-driven customer experiences at scale
- You will oversee global Lifecycle Operations while serving as the primary Lifecycle business owner for our customer engagement and orchestration platform and the broader technology and data ecosystem that powers customer engagement
- Today, Braze sits at the center of that ecosystem
- You will define platform strategy and stewardship; journey and campaign operations; customer data and audience capabilities; personalization and decisioning; governance; automation; capacity; and partner delivery
- This will build capabilities that can scale globally while supporting the needs of individual regions and markets
- Sitting at the intersection of Lifecycle Marketing, Marketing Technology, Data, Product, and Operations, this role combines ownership of the technical foundation that powers Lifecycle with leadership of the operating model that brings it to life
- You will partner closely with Marketing, Martech, Product, Engineering, Data Engineering, Analytics, and regional teams, serving as the connective tissue among customer strategy, platform capabilities, data, and execution
- You will bring strong operational leadership with meaningful technical depth and experience operating at a global scale
- You will help build the next stage of Lifecycle Marketing by building a high-performing global operation, shaping the Lifecycle technology roadmap, evolving our customer engagement and orchestration capabilities, diagnosing data and platform issues, and creating processes that enable global strategies to be efficiently localized across markets, languages, channels, and regulatory environments
- Lifecycle Technology & Platform Leadership
- Serve as the primary Lifecycle business owner and technical subject-matter expert for Braze and the broader Lifecycle technology ecosystem, with deep working knowledge of Braze Canvas and campaign architecture, Liquid, Catalogs, Connected Content and API integrations, segmentation, personalization, experimentation, channel configuration, and AI-enabled decisioning and orchestration capabilities; own platform strategy, governance, configuration standards, roadmap priorities, tooling, consumption, and ongoing platform health
- Partner directly with Martech, Product, Engineering, and Data Engineering to define and operationalize the events, attributes, APIs, data contracts, and integrations required to build trigger-based Lifecycle journeys in Braze, including API-based ingestion and utilization of content and metadata to power real-time, contextually relevant intervention messaging across global and regional teams
- Serve as Lifecycle’s dedicated partner to the Braze Technical Account team, leading enhancement discovery, technical recommendations, platform adoption, and roadmap planning; translate emerging Braze and AI capabilities into prioritized use cases and regularly share roadmap implications, recommendations, and enablement guidance with cross-functional Lifecycle Directors and Leadership
- Establish best practices for journey architecture, event-driven messaging, segmentation, channel orchestration, experimentation, personalization, and reusable platform capabilities
- Maintain a strong understanding of how our customer engagement and orchestration platform connects to Product, customer data platforms, content systems, analytics, reporting, and downstream destinations, and identify opportunities to improve or simplify the ecosystem
- Global Lifecycle Operations
- Lead the global operating model supporting Lifecycle teams and programs across regions and markets, including subscription journeys and automations, regional marketing, ecommerce, games, manga, theatrical, events, and the broader Crunchyroll fan ecosystem
- Own the end-to-end operational process from intake and prioritization through audience development, campaign and journey build, QA, deployment, monitoring, and optimization
- Build scalable campaign and journey operations that allow global strategies and capabilities to be efficiently adapted and localized across markets, languages, channels, and regulatory requirements while maintaining speed, quality, and consistency
- Build and continuously improve a flexible delivery model across internal teams, regional resources, agency partners, offshore resources, specialized technical expertise, and automation
- Establish clear standards for prioritization, capacity management, development, QA, launch readiness, documentation, incident management, and operational performance—continually improving speed, quality, reliability, and efficiency
- Lifecycle Data, Audiences & Personalization
- Own Lifecycle Marketing requirements for the events, attributes, audiences, preferences, behavioral signals, content data, and other customer inputs needed to power personalized experiences across markets
- Partner with CDI, Data Engineering, Martech, Product, and Analytics to identify data gaps, improve signal quality and observability, and prioritize instrumentation and integration needs
- Enable increasingly sophisticated audience creation, behavioral triggers, content affinity, personalization, decisioning, and next-best-action capabilities that can be applied globally while allowing for regional and market-level relevance
- Translate customer and marketing strategies into clear data and technical requirements and help ensure Lifecycle-critical data is reliable, measurable, and fit for purpose
- Governance, Automation & Scale
- Reimagine and maintain global governance for customer communications, including messaging hierarchy, prioritization, frequency management, consent and preferences, suppression logic, and cross-channel coordination
- Define scalable global standards for campaign quality, approvals, deliverability, accessibility, localization readiness, documentation, and operational controls, while accommodating market-specific requirements where needed
- Identify and implement practical applications of automation and AI across audience creation, journey development, QA, personalization, content production, workflow management, reporting, and knowledge management
- Continuously evaluate new platform capabilities and emerging technologies, helping move high-value opportunities from pilots into repeatable, scalable solutions across markets
- Team & Cross-Functional Leadership
- Build, develop, and lead a high-performing Lifecycle Technology & Operations team with strong capabilities across platform enablement, journey development, campaign operations, data quality, and operational governance
- Manage agency and external partner performance across quality, throughput, cost, technical capability, service levels, and continuous improvement, building partners toward greater autonomy and accountability
- Serve as a key connector between global Lifecycle Marketing, regional teams, and technical partners, translating marketing ambition into technical requirements while helping marketers understand platform capabilities, constraints, and opportunities
- Influence cross-functional technology and data roadmaps by clearly articulating Lifecycle use cases, customer impact, regional requirements, dependencies, operational needs, and measurable business value
- In the role of Director, Lifecycle Technology & Operations, you will report to the VP, Lifecycle Marketing
- Lifecycle Marketing is part of Crunchyroll’s broader Growth organization and is responsible for building deeper, more relevant relationships with fans throughout their journey with Crunchyroll
- Our team works globally across membership engagement and retention, regional title marketing, ecommerce, games, manga, theatrical, events, and other parts of the Crunchyroll fan experience. We partner closely with Product, Martech, Data, Analytics, Content, and regional teams to connect those experiences through increasingly personalized, data-driven customer communications
- Lifecycle Technology & Operations provides the operational and technical foundation that makes that work scalable, reliable, locally relevant, and increasingly sophisticated across global markets
Our take
In recent decades, anime - encompassing Japanese, Korean, and Chinese animation 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 unrivalled library of anime content, boasting over 44,000 episodes, attracting over 21M 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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