Senior Software Engineer, EDGE Discovery at Crunchyroll in San Francisco, CA, United States

Job description

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

• 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

Skills

Required

• Backend development
• Distributed systems design
• API architecture
• Cloud-native technologies
• Scalability
• Fault tolerance
• Observability
• Reliability engineering
• Caching strategies
• Asynchronous processing
• Event-driven architectures
• Distributed data consistency patterns

Preferred

• Search systems
• Recommendation platforms
• Personalization systems
• Metadata services
• Experimentation platforms
• Analytics pipelines
• Machine learning integration workflows

Benefits

• 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!
• 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