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Entertainment, Streaming Media, Digital Media, Anime

Senior Manager, Platform Development

San Francisco, California, United StatesHybridFull TimeSenior$235,000–$285,000 /yrPosted 2 months agoVisa sponsorship available

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Role summary

Crunchyroll is seeking a Senior Manager, Platform Development to lead a team of software engineers responsible for the core access and security platform. This includes authentication, authorization, notifications, and AI runtimes, enabling other teams to build fan-facing features securely and compliantly. The role involves owning team strategy and execution, decomposing legacy systems, evolving the notification stack, and building foundations for an AI inference platform. The ideal candidate has 10+ years of experience in cloud-native backend/platform services and 4+ years in engineering management, with deep experience in cloud providers (AWS preferred), modern architectures, and consumer access domains. Responsibilities include team leadership, roadmap ownership, platform modernization, cross-functional collaboration, and operational excellence, ensuring reliability, security, and operability.

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 Team

The Platform Development organization powers Crunchyroll's core access and security platform. This platform includes authentication and authorization, notifications, and AI runtimes. It enables other teams to safely build fan-facing features on top of a stable, compliant, and leverageable foundation.

The team's mission is to provide reliable, secure fan access across devices and partners, integrate access services with data and compliance orchestration, and evolve notifications and AI inference into reusable platform capabilities that accelerate product and partner launches. We collaborate with product, data, security, client engineering, video, and service monetization teams to deliver seamless and secure experiences for millions of anime fans worldwide.

About the Role

As the Senior Manager, Platform Development, you will report to the VP of Platform Engineering. You will lead a team of software engineers building and operating the core services that govern how fans access Crunchyroll. These services include login, identity, authorization, partner authentication, compliance-aware account flows, notifications, and AI runtimes.

You will own the team's strategy and execution, guiding the decomposition of legacy authentication and IAM into clearer, safer platform services, stabilizing and evolving our notification stack toward a unified orchestration layer, and working with our data team to layer the foundations of a shared AI inference platform. You will lean on your engineering and leadership experience to raise the bar on architecture, reliability, security, and delivery, while hiring and developing a high-performing, inclusive team aligned to Crunchyroll's values.

We are considering applicants based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Core Responsibilities

Team leadership and people management

  • Lead, coach, and grow a team of software engineers, providing clear expectations, feedback, and career development aligned with Crunchyroll's engineering manager career ladder.
  • Hire and onboard diverse talent, build an inclusive team culture, and set a high bar for engineering quality, ownership, and collaboration.

    • Domain ownership: access, notifications, and AI runtimes

  • Own the roadmap and execution for Platform Development's core domains: authentication and identity, authorization, notifications, and AI runtimes, ensuring these services are reliable, secure, and easy for other teams to adopt.
  • Partner with Data and security teams to integrate access services with compliance orchestration for GDPR/DSAR and age-assurance requirements, including data wipe/anonymization and age-based access controls in key markets.
  • Define and maintain SLOs, on-call practices, and incident response workflows for your services, in partnership with SRE/DevOps and Engineering Operations.

    • Platform architecture and modernization

  • Lead the decomposition of existing account-auth and IAM systems into well-bounded services (core auth, client policies, consent, risk/security), laying the groundwork for future capabilities like passkeys, social login, and targeted friction models.
  • Guide the evolution of notifications from legacy systems toward a modern, observable Universal Notification Orchestrator, starting with critical flows such as OTP and security/compliance messaging.
  • Collaborate with Data and AI/ML teams to define the vision and reference architecture for a shared AI inference platform, supporting multi-model serving, observability, and cost management for risk, security, and experience optimization use cases.

    • Cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management

  • Work closely with product management, program management, and partner teams to translate fan and business outcomes into a clear, prioritized roadmap for Platform Development.
  • Partner with client, video, and partner engineering to improve authentication success, account linking flows, and time-to-first-play across distribution channels and devices.
  • Communicate status, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to senior leadership, ensuring alignment on priorities and visible impact to fan experience, regulatory posture, and platform leverage.

    • Operational excellence and continuous improvement

  • Ensure your team designs for observability, security, and operability, embedding testing, monitoring, alerting, and runbooks into all critical services.
  • Use incident and operational data to drive learning and durable improvements, in partnership with SRE and Engineering Operations (RCA, standards, and best practices).
  • Contribute to and adopt shared engineering practices across Platform Engineering, including multi-account AWS patterns, GitHub security, and self-service infrastructure and deployment workflows.

    • About You

    We get excited about candidates, like you, because:

  • You have 10+ years of experience building and operating cloud-native backend or platform services at scale, and 4+ years of experience managing engineering teams.
  • You have deep experience with at least one major cloud provider (preferably AWS) and modern application architectures (microservices, event-driven systems), including APIs, queues, and data stores.
  • You are proficient in one or more backend programming languages (such as TypeScript, Go, Java, or Python) and can meaningfully review designs and code with your team.
  • You have led teams responsible for authentication, identity, authorization, notifications, or similar consumer access domains, with a strong understanding of security, fraud, and trust considerations.
  • You are comfortable partnering on compliance and data protection topics (e.g., GDPR/DSAR, data retention, age assurance) and integrating technical systems with policy and regulatory requirements.
  • You have experience working with or around AI/ML production systems—such as inference runtimes, model deployment, or ML-powered risk/scoring systems—or are eager to learn and partner closely with ML/AI teams in this area.
  • You can synthesize complex tradeoffs for technical and non-technical audiences, and build trust across teams and time zones.

    • 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
    $235,000—$285,000 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.

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

    Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for more information about how we process your personal information, and your data protection rights: https://tbcdn.talentbrew.com/company/22978/v1_0/docs/spe-jobs-privacy-policy-update-for-crpa-dec-21-22.pdf

    Please beware of recent scams to online job seekers. Those applying to our job openings will only be contacted directly from @crunchyroll.com email account.

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