Senior Software Engineer, EDGE Discovery

Crunchyroll; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Crunchyroll is seeking a Backend Senior Engineer to help power its discovery ecosystem. You will design scalable backend systems for search, recommendations, and content discovery, partnering with product, data, and ML teams to improve relevance.

Ideal candidates have 8+ years building large-scale backend systems, strong API and cloud-native skills (AWS), and a track record mentoring engineers across teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing and building large-scale backend systems.
• Strong experience with distributed systems and API design.
• Production-grade cloud-native architectures with AWS.
• Experience with video streaming or media platforms is a plus.
• Ability to lead and mentor engineers across teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and evolve scalable backend systems powering search, recommendations, and content discovery.
• Lead architectural decisions for distributed systems focusing on scalability, low latency, resiliency, and observability.
• Build and optimize APIs, metadata services, indexing pipelines, ranking, and recommendation infrastructure.
• Partner with product, ML, data, and platform teams to improve discovery relevance and experimentation capabilities.
• Mentor engineers and drive best practices in tooling, automation, and deployment safety.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API architecture

Cloud-native technologies

AWS

Mentoring / leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD pipelines

PostgreSQL/NoSQL

Job description

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

About You

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 plat