Principal Engineer, Crunchyroll
Engineering Practices
$260.4-325.5k
+ Performance bonus
Streaming service for anime and manga
Be an early applicant
Streaming service for anime and manga
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$260.4-325.5k
+ Performance bonus
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 15+ years of experience in Software Engineering
- You possess strong Leadership skills. You raise the bar, lead by example, and mentor others
- You are highly-collaborative. You influence through credibility over authority, working with all levels across the organization
- You have technical expertise across the full stack, and are able to provide insights and guidance to front-end, back-end or infrastructure teams, when needed
- You have experience designing, implementing and operating services at large scale
- You communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior engineering, product, and business leaders
- You are a hands-on engineer that codes, knows how to validate designs, investigate difficult technical problems, and contribute directly to critical initiatives
- You are able to distinguish and balance between long-term architectural direction and pragmatic delivery, knowing when to standardize, when to extend existing systems, and when a new approach is needed
- You are skilled at defining architecture principles, patterns, and best practices that improve consistency, quality, and engineering velocity across multiple teams
- You can translate business strategy and product requirements into clear technical direction, identifying the capabilities, investments, and sequencing needed for long-term success
- You excel at strong architectural judgment and are able to evaluate tradeoffs across scalability, reliability, security, performance, cost, complexity, and time to market
What the job involves
- The Principal Engineer, Engineering Practices is a senior technical leader responsible for strengthening engineering excellence across Crunchyroll through technical strategy, architectural guidance, engineering best practices, and technical mentorship
- Reporting to the VP, Engineering Operations and Strategy, this role partners closely with Engineering Leadership, and Principal and Staff Engineers across all engineering domains to help shape the company's long-term technical strategy, while enabling engineering teams to make high-quality architectural decisions independently
- Rather than acting as a centralized architecture authority, this role succeeds by influencing through technical credibility, developing engineering capability, and fostering a culture of technical ownership
- The Principal Engineer serves as a force multiplier through building frameworks, coaching technical leaders, and creating reusable patterns that allow teams to solve increasingly complex problems themselves
- Success is measured not by the number of architectural decisions made personally, but by the growth of engineering capability, technical leadership, and organizational excellence across the Engineering organization
- Drive Technical Strategy
- Partner with the SVP of Engineering and Engineering Leadership to translate business priorities into a long-term technical strategy
- Identify strategic technology investments that improve scalability, reliability, security, and developer productivity
- Help align technical initiatives across engineering domains while respecting domain ownership
- Evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and engineering practices that improve engineering effectiveness
- Influence Architecture Through Guidance
- Develop reusable architectural patterns, reference implementations, and engineering guidance that teams can adopt
- Help teams evaluate architectural tradeoffs and make informed technical decisions
- Encourage consistency in service architecture through collaboration, education, and proven practices
- Facilitate technical design discussions for high-impact initiatives when appropriate
- Build Engineering Capability
- Coach and mentor Principal, Staff, Senior, and emerging technical leaders across the Engineering organization
- Foster architectural thinking and strong technical decision-making within engineering teams
- Support career growth for senior technical contributors through mentorship and technical coaching
- Lead architecture workshops, technical learning sessions, and engineering forums
- Help cultivate the next generation of technical leaders across the organization
- Drive Organizational Learning
- Capture institutional knowledge and transform it into reusable engineering guidance
- Develop technical documentation, architecture patterns, playbooks, and reference materials that reduce dependency on individual experts
- Identify recurring engineering challenges and partner with teams create scalable solutions that benefit multiple domains
- Improve onboarding and knowledge transfer for engineers through documentation and education
- Promote a culture of continuous learning and technical curiosity throughout Engineering
- What Success Looks Like:
- Engineering teams confidently make high-quality architectural decisions with minimal centralized guidance
- Technical leadership capability continues to grow throughout the Engineering organization
- Engineering best practices are widely adopted through influence, education, and demonstrated value rather than mandate
- Architectural knowledge is broadly distributed, reducing reliance on individual subject matter experts
- Proven architecture patterns and engineering guidance are consistently reused across teams
- Strong collaboration exists across Engineering domains
- Operational excellence, including reliability, observability, security, maintainability, and developer experience is embedded within engineering teams
- Engineering teams increasingly solve complex technical challenges independently, demonstrating stronger technical ownership and organizational capability
- The Engineering Practices team is newly formed as part of Engineering Strategy and Operations
- The team is a multiplier with the broader Engineering organization
- We create operational effectiveness, define and nurture organizational culture, and inform and communicate cross-functionally
- We strive to ensure the broader Engineering team is operating at the highest level of excellence
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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