Senior Software Engineer

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

In the role of Senior Software Engineer for Concepts Lab, you will report to the VP of the Concepts Lab.

We are considering applicants for the location of Los Angeles, CA (onsite).

As a Senior Software Engineer in Concepts Lab, you will take the lab’s validated experiments into production and embed directly with the teams who will run them long-term. For a defined period on each engagement, you will work inside a delivery team’s codebase and processes, building out the experiment to production quality, then hand off ownership, runbooks, and documentation so the team can carry it forward without you. The lab moves in short cycles, so you will decide when to prototype quickly and when to build something meant to last, and each engagement ends with a real handoff, not a demo.

The team is small, which makes your work visible: the systems you build become the foundation the receiving team adopts, and the standards you set for testing, documentation, and release safety become the standard they inherit. You will also share in the operational ownership of what the lab runs, on a rotation across the team, until handoff is complete. Success in your first year looks like experiments that graduated into long-term teams because the engineering under them held up, and because the handoff itself was clean.

Core Areas of Responsibility

• Build and help deliver experiences to our internal experimental environment. Own its reliability, deployment path, and the ability to stand a new experiment up quickly.
• Design, build, and ship the software behind the lab’s experiments directly inside production environments, turning unclear asks into a crisp plan and a milestone path.
• Embed with delivery teams for the duration of each engagement, working within their systems and conventions to implement and build out the lab’s experiments.
• Own production health during the engagement, including security patching, dependency upgrades, bug reduction, scaling work, runbooks, and documentation, shared on a rotation across the team.
• Set the technical bar for the lab’s software work, including design reviews, code quality, test coverage, observability, cost management, and security practices.
• Lead the handoff of validated experiments to the long-term owning team, so what graduates out of the lab arrives documented, supportable, and fully owned by the receiving team.
• Mentor the engineers and contractors who collaborate with us, contribute to hiring, and help shape how Crunchyroll Engineering builds software.

About You

We get excited about candidates, like you, because...

• You have 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• You have designed systems with multiple components interacting across API or service boundaries, and you anticipate the failure modes before they reach customers.
• You write production-grade Python and/or TypeScript and have built software that other engineers chose to adopt because it made their work easier.
• You have built and maintained CI/CD pipelines and integrated automated testing into them.
• You use AI, including agentic coding tools and workflows, to accelerate complex delivery, refactors, and migrations while ensuring correctness and production safety.
• You have carried operational ownership for services you built: runbooks, diagnostics, and incident follow-through.
• You have experience working in early-stage, ambiguous environments where you define the problem as much as you solve it, and you know when to prototype quickly versus when to build for the long term.

Nice to Have

• Experience in media, streaming, or gaming
• Experience working in an innovation lab, incubation environment, or R&D organization
• Experience with agentic coding tools and frameworks (Claude Code, Cursor, or comparable) used across the full development cycle

About the Team

The Concepts Lab is Crunchyroll’s R&D and incubation group, focused on exploring new ideas, technologies, and experiences for anime fans. The team partners closely with engineering, product, and business leaders to test assumptions, build evidence, and transition validated concepts into delivery teams.

Our work spans early discovery through beta execution, with an emphasis on learning quickly, reducing risk, and setting teams up for long-term success.

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 

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.

Questions about Crunchyroll’s hiring process? Please check out our Hiring FAQs: https://help.crunchyroll.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040471712-Crunchyroll-Hiring-FAQs

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