Creative Director, Crunchyroll
$264.6-330.8k
Streaming service for anime and manga
Be an early applicant
Streaming service for anime and manga
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$264.6-330.8k
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
- 12+ years of experience in creative leadership within digital platforms, subscription products, or entertainment ecosystems
- Strong portfolio demonstrating high-end digital experiences with measurable impact
- Experience shaping onboarding, monetization, personalization, or loyalty experiences
- Deep expertise in visual systems, motion, typography, and immersive digital expression
- Proven ability to partner with senior business leaders
- Ability to balance experimentation with brand and experiential consistency
- Exceptional presentation and communication skills
- Passion for culture, entertainment, and/or fan-driven communities
What the job involves
- The Creative team defines and elevates the visual and experiential standard across our platform
- Within Platform Services, we shape foundational member journeys — onboarding, identity, monetization moments, discovery intelligence, experimentation frameworks, and loyalty experiences
- Creative Directors serve as senior creative authorities, partnering directly with Product leadership to transform strategic objectives into concept-driven, high-design streaming experiences
- This role reports to the Executive Creative Director
- As Creative Director – Platform Services, you are responsible for defining and driving the creative vision across membership, growth, experimentation, and loyalty experiences
- You will shape how members enter our ecosystem, how they discover content tailored to them, how they experience value in upgrading, and how loyalty programs feel meaningful and differentiated
- This role requires a refined creative sensibility applied to strategic, high-impact surfaces. Growth and monetization experiences must feel cohesive, premium, and culturally aligned — never transactional or purely mechanical
- This is a concept-first, craft-led leadership role focused on elevating foundational platform moments into immersive, high-end member experiences
- Define the creative direction for onboarding, account creation, and identity surfaces
- Elevate upgrade and monetization moments into thoughtful, value-driven experiences
- Ensure membership flows feel premium, intuitive, and emotionally aligned with the brand
- Identify opportunities to create stronger narrative continuity throughout the member lifecycle
- Shape creative direction for personalized discovery systems and curated content experiences
- Ensure recommendation surfaces feel intelligent, expressive, and visually refined
- Elevate content tailoring into immersive experiences rather than purely functional sorting
- Partner on experimentation initiatives to ensure new experiences maintain creative integrity
- Define creative vision for loyalty programs, reward systems, and member benefit experiences
- Ensure loyalty initiatives feel aspirational and brand-aligned
- Elevate partner integrations into cohesive, premium experiences
- Create visual and experiential consistency across reward touchpoints
- Partner with experimentation teams to explore new experiences that drive retention and growth
- Ensure creative quality is preserved even within iterative testing environments
- Advocate for long-term experiential coherence while supporting innovation
- Own and continuously raise the creative standard across all Platform Services surfaces
- Provide rigorous creative direction and critique
- Ensure excellence in typography, layout, motion, hierarchy, and interaction design
- Champion high-end design across onboarding, monetization, and loyalty experiences
- Serve as the primary creative partner to the Platform Services Product SVP
- Translate growth and retention objectives into compelling creative strategies
- Influence strategic initiatives at the concept stage
- Build trusted, collaborative relationships across Product, Engineering, and Data partners
- Lead designers aligned to Platform Services
- Elevate conceptual thinking and visual craft
- Foster ambition, accountability, and ownership of creative excellence
- Develop high-potential creative talent
- Present creative direction with clarity and narrative strength
- Advocate for elevated, differentiated experiences in executive forums
- Align creative decisions with broader brand direction set by the ECD
- Success in This Role Looks Like:
- Onboarding and upgrade experiences that feel premium, not transactional
- Discovery systems that feel intelligent, expressive, and immersive
- Loyalty programs that deepen emotional connection to membership
- Growth and retention initiatives that maintain high-end creative standards
- Strong partnership and trust with Platform Services leadership
- Clear differentiation through craft and experiential sophistication
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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