Principal Product Manager, Crunchyroll
Search & Content Understanding
$221-276k
+ Performance bonus earning potential
Streaming service for anime and manga
Be an early applicant
Streaming service for anime and manga
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$221-276k
+ Performance bonus earning potential
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
- Experienced Product Leader: 15+ years in product management, including 5+ years leading search, personalization, or metadata systems in streaming media, large-scale consumer, or content platforms
- Metadata and Knowledge Graph Expertise: Deep understanding of content modeling, tagging, and knowledge graph architecture, with experience integrating structured and ML-derived metadata into user-facing systems
- Search and Relevance Fluency: Skilled in the design and optimization of search systems, query understanding, ranking logic, and data pipelines that improve retrieval quality and user satisfaction
- Metrics-Driven Operator: Proven track record of defining and delivering KPIs tied to engagement, relevance, and catalog utilization
- Strategic Communicator: Able to articulate a discovery systems vision that balances innovation with measurable business outcomes
- Collaborative Partner: Experienced in leading cross-functional collaboration with ML, engineering, design, curation, and data science to deliver unified discovery capabilities
What the job involves
- As Principal Product Manager for Search & Content Understanding, you will define how Crunchyroll connects fans to the anime they love—and helps them discover new stories—through fast, relevant, and data-driven discovery systems
- You’ll lead initiatives that combine search relevance, metadata enrichment, and content relationships to make discovery more meaningful, efficient, and personalized across our global platforms
- You will partner closely with machine learning engineers, data scientists, and design teams to shape the discovery strategy, guide the roadmap, and build scalable systems that enhance engagement across the Crunchyroll ecosystem
- Beyond optimizing search, you’ll evolve our content intelligence layer—integrating knowledge graphs, third-party and ML-generated metadata, and relational modeling across our catalog to fuel the future of curation, personalization, and discovery
- Search Innovation: Deliver faster, smarter, and more relevant search experiences by combining relevance modeling, semantic understanding, and user intent prediction. Ensure every fan can find what they’re looking for—and discover something new—effortlessly
- Content Understanding and Knowledge Graphs: Develop and expand Crunchyroll’s metadata and knowledge graph systems to represent relationships between titles, creators, genres, and themes
- Leverage both internal and third-party metadata to improve search, curation, and personalization fidelity
- AI and ML Collaboration: Partner with ML and data science teams to identify, pilot, and scale new AI-driven approaches to content understanding, query interpretation, and relationship modeling
- Contribute to roadmap decisions on how ML systems shape discovery outcomes
- Discovery Platform Integration: Collaborate across curation, personalization, and engineering teams to ensure that metadata and search systems serve as a shared foundation for all discovery experiences
- Drive alignment across tools and surfaces to unify how content is described and surfaced
- Cross-Platform Enablement: Own the search experience across Crunchyroll’s first-party platforms and work with the Partner Integrations team to ensure that the same relevance and metadata principles extend to third-party distribution partners (e.g., Apple, Amazon, Roku)
- Experimentation and Optimization: Champion a culture of data-informed iteration
- Design experiments to evaluate model performance, query relevance, and engagement metrics, translating insights into actionable improvements
- Outcome Accountability: Define and deliver measurable improvements in discovery KPIs such as search success rate, time-to-engagement, catalog depth, and minutes watched from discovery-driven entry points
- The SVOD Product team at Crunchyroll is dedicated to connecting fans with the anime they love and helping them discover new stories that inspire deeper fandom
- We’re building a scalable discovery platform that unites curation, personalization, and search under a shared data and metadata foundation
- Our work is highly collaborative—partnering with engineering, data science, design, and programming to deliver experiences that delight fans and grow engagement across Crunchyroll’s ecosystem
- This role is based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Dallas and reports to the Director of Product, Personalization & Platform
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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