Principal Product Manager, Search & Content Understanding

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

As Principal Product Manager for Search & Content Understanding, you will define how Crunchyroll connects fans to the anime they love—and helps them discover new stories—through fast, relevant, and data-driven discovery systems. You’ll lead initiatives that combine search relevance, metadata enrichment, and content relationships to make discovery more meaningful, efficient, and personalized across our global platforms.

You will partner closely with machine learning engineers, data scientists, and design teams to shape the discovery strategy, guide the roadmap, and build scalable systems that enhance engagement across the Crunchyroll ecosystem. Beyond optimizing search, you’ll evolve our content intelligence layer—integrating knowledge graphs, third-party and ML-generated metadata, and relational modeling across our catalog to fuel the future of curation, personalization, and discovery.

Your Core Responsibilities

• Search Innovation
Deliver faster, smarter, and more relevant search experiences by combining relevance modeling, semantic understanding, and user intent prediction. Ensure every fan can find what they’re looking for—and discover something new—effortlessly.

• Content Understanding and Knowledge Graphs
Develop and expand Crunchyroll’s metadata and knowledge graph systems to represent relationships between titles, creators, genres, and themes. Leverage both internal and third-party metadata to improve search, curation, and personalization fidelity.

• AI and ML Collaboration
Partner with ML and data science teams to identify, pilot, and scale new AI-driven approaches to content understanding, query interpretation, and relationship modeling. Contribute to roadmap decisions on how ML systems shape discovery outcomes.

• Discovery Platform Integration
Collaborate across curation, personalization, and engineering teams to ensure that metadata and search systems serve as a shared foundation for all discovery experiences. Drive alignment across tools and surfaces to unify how content is described and surfaced.

• Cross-Platform Enablement
Own the search experience across Crunchyroll’s first-party platforms and work with the Partner Integrations team to ensure that the same relevance and metadata principles extend to third-party distribution partners (e.g., Apple, Amazon, Roku).

• Experimentation and Optimization
Champion a culture of data-informed iteration. Design experiments to evaluate model performance, query relevance, and engagement metrics, translating insights into actionable improvements.

• Outcome Accountability
Define and deliver measurable improvements in discovery KPIs such as search success rate, time-to-engagement, catalog depth, and minutes watched from discovery-driven entry points.

About the Team

The SVOD Product team at Crunchyroll is dedicated to connecting fans with the anime they love and helping them discover new stories that inspire deeper fandom. We’re building a scalable discovery platform that unites curation, personalization, and search under a shared data and metadata foundation. Our work is highly collaborative—partnering with engineering, data science, design, and programming to deliver experiences that delight fans and grow engagement across Crunchyroll’s ecosystem.

About You

• Experienced Product Leader: 15+ years in product management, including 5+ years leading search, personalization, or metadata systems in streaming media, large-scale consumer, or content platforms.

• Metadata and Knowledge Graph Expertise: Deep understanding of content modeling, tagging, and knowledge graph architecture, with experience integrating structured and ML-derived metadata into user-facing systems.

• Search and Relevance Fluency: Skilled in the design and optimization of search systems, query understanding, ranking logic, and data pipelines that improve retrieval quality and user satisfaction.

• Metrics-Driven Operator: Proven track record of defining and delivering KPIs tied to engagement, relevance, and catalog utilization.

• Strategic Communicator: Able to articulate a discovery systems vision that balances innovation with measurable business outcomes.

• Collaborative Partner: Experienced in leading cross-functional collaboration with ML, engineering, design, curation, and data science to deliver unified discovery capabilities.

Location

This role is based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Dallas and reports to the Director of Product, Personalization & Platform.

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 ((select from the following job modalities for this role: #LI-Hybrid #LI-remote #LI-onsite))

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
$221,000—$276,000 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.

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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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