Senior Software Engineer, Crunchyroll
EDGE Discovery
$203.4-235k
+ Performance bonus
Streaming service for anime and manga
Be an early applicant
Streaming service for anime and manga
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$203.4-235k
+ 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
- This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex challenges in distributed systems, scaling high-traffic backend services, and building systems that directly impact how millions of users discover and experience content
- Experience building backend systems for large-scale streaming, media, or other consumer content platforms is strongly preferred for this role
- We are looking for a highly motivated engineer with deep backend engineering expertise and a strong track record of building scalable distributed systems
- 8+ years of experience designing and building large-scale backend systems and microservices architectures
- Strong proficiency in backend development, distributed systems design, API architecture, and cloud-native technologies
- Experience operating high-traffic services in production environments with strong understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and reliability engineering principles
- Strong experience with large-scale video streaming, media, or consumer content platforms, including an understanding of the performance, reliability, and scale requirements of streaming user experiences
- Experience with search systems, recommendation platforms, personalization systems, metadata services, or large-scale content delivery architectures, preferably in a streaming environment
- Strong understanding of caching strategies, asynchronous processing, event-driven architectures, and distributed data consistency patterns
- Experience with AWS or similar cloud platforms, including modern infrastructure and deployment patterns
- Familiarity with experimentation platforms, analytics pipelines, or machine learning integration workflows is a plus
- Experience improving engineering productivity through platform capabilities, automation, tooling, or developer experience initiatives
- Excellent problem-solving, communication, and technical leadership skills
- Proven ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, product, platform, and data organizations
- Ability to influence technical direction and drive alignment in highly cross-functional environments
- Strong sense of ownership and empathy for both internal engineering teams and end-user experience
What the job involves
- The EDGE Discovery team at Crunchyroll is focused on powering content discoverability experiences across the platform. We build and evolve the backend systems that enable anime fans worldwide to seamlessly discover, browse, search, and engage with Crunchyroll’s catalog through personalized, highly scalable experiences
- Our systems power critical user journeys, including home page personalization, search, recommendations, metadata delivery, content ranking, and discovery APIs across all Crunchyroll platforms and devices. We operate at the intersection of backend platform engineering, large-scale distributed systems, and machine-learning enablement, with a strong focus on performance, scalability, relevance, and reliability
- As a Backend Senior Engineer, you will help drive the technical direction and architecture of the services that power Crunchyroll’s discovery ecosystem. You will partner closely with engineering, product, data, and machine learning teams to build highly scalable backend platforms that improve content discoverability and user engagement while enabling teams to iterate quickly and safely
- Design, develop, and evolve scalable backend systems that power search, recommendations, personalization, and content discovery experiences across Crunchyroll platforms
- Lead architectural decisions for distributed systems with a focus on scalability, low latency, resiliency, observability, and operational excellence
- Build and optimize APIs, metadata services, indexing pipelines, ranking systems, and recommendation infrastructure that support high-throughput user experiences
- Partner closely with product, machine learning, data, and platform teams to improve discovery relevance, personalization quality, and experimentation capabilities
- Drive backend platform improvements that enhance developer productivity, deployment safety, and service reliability
- Define and implement engineering best practices around API design, data consistency, caching strategies, asynchronous processing, resiliency, and monitoring
- Identify and proactively address performance bottlenecks, scaling challenges, and operational risks across discovery systems
- Support experimentation and A/B testing frameworks that enable rapid iteration on discovery and recommendation experiences
- Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership through design reviews, architecture discussions, and cross-team collaboration
- Influence long-term technical direction and build alignment across multiple engineering organizations
- Champion engineering excellence through pragmatic improvements to tooling, automation, documentation, and operational workflows
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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