Senior Software Engineer, EDGE Discovery

About Crunchyroll

Founded by fans, Crunchyroll delivers the art and culture of anime to a passionate community. We super-serve over 100 million anime and manga fans across 200+ countries and territories, and help them connect with the stories and characters they crave. Whether that experience is online or in-person, streaming video, theatrical, games, merchandise, events and more, it’s powered by the anime content we all love.

Join our team, and help us shape the future of anime!

About the Role

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.

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.

What You Will Be Doing

• 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

Qualifications

We are looking for a highly motivated engineer with deep backend engineering expertise and a strong track record of building scalable distributed systems.

To be successful in this role, you should have:

• 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

About the Team

The EDGE Discovery team is responsible for the backend systems and platform capabilities that power content discovery across Crunchyroll. We enable personalized and scalable user experiences through search, recommendations, metadata services, ranking systems, and discovery APIs, helping fans connect with the content they love.

Our team focuses on building resilient, scalable, and high-performance backend services that support millions of users globally in a rapidly evolving content ecosystem. We value ownership, collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement while working closely with cross-functional partners to shape the future of content discovery at Crunchyroll.

Why you will love working at Crunchyroll

In addition to getting to work with fun, passionate and inspired colleagues, you will also enjoy the following benefits and perks:

• 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!

#LifeAtCrunchyroll #LI-Hybrid

The Pay Range for this position is listed. Actual pay will vary based on factors including, but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Crunchyroll’s Total Rewards offerings for employees. Other rewards may include performance bonuses, employer matched retirement savings, time-off programs, and progressive health benefits and perks.

Pay Transparency - San Francisco, CA

$203,400—$235,000 USD

About our Values

We want to be everything for someone rather than something for everyone and we do this by living and modeling our values in all that we do. We value

• Courage. We believe that when we overcome fear, we enable our best selves.
• Curiosity. We are curious, which is the gateway to empathy, inclusion, and understanding.
• Kaizen. We have a growth mindset committed to constant forward progress.
• Service. We serve our community with humility, enabling joy and belonging for others.

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion

Our mission of helping people belong reflects our commitment to diversity & inclusion. It's just the way we do business.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at Crunchyroll. Pursuant to applicable law, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Crunchyroll, LLC is an independently operated joint venture between US-based Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Japan's Aniplex, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., both subsidiaries of Tokyo-based Sony Group Corporation.

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