Principal Product Manager - Personalization & Search

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 - Personalization & Search, you'll connect our fans to the rich world of anime by delivering personalized discovery and search experiences that drive measurable engagement. You'll help lead initiatives that increase minutes watched, reduce time to engagement, and broaden the range of content fans enjoy. Partnering with machine learning engineers, content curators, and fellow product leaders, you'll shape strategy, guide the roadmap, and launch products that elevate discovery across the entire Crunchyroll ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Personalization Strategy & Execution: Help develop and optimize a comprehensive personalization and recommendation strategy in partnership with ML engineers and curators.
• Search Innovation: Collaborate across engineering, data science, and design to deliver smarter, faster, and more relevant search powered by machine learning.
• AI Exploration: Partner with technical teams to identify and pilot emerging AI tools and methodologies that address customer and business needs.
• Content & User Understanding: Work with data science and content teams to build actionable profiles that power personalized recommendations and search results.
• Outcome-Driven Optimization: Deliver measurable improvements in discovery and engagement by increasing minutes watched from personalized curation, reducing time to engagement, boosting CTR on personalized surfaces, improving search success rates, and expanding the diversity of content consumed per user.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with teams in engineering, programming, marketing, design, legal, and compliance to develop high-quality, high-trust products.
• Continuous Model Experimentation: Champion a data-driven culture of experimentation focused on testing, comparing, and refining different recommendation and search models to maximize relevance and engagement.

You will report to the Director of Product: Personalization & Platform.

This role is based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Dallas.

About You

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

• Experienced Product Innovator: Bachelor's degree (or higher) with 12+ years in product management, including 5+ years working on personalization/recommendation and search initiatives.
• Someone Who Has Deep Content Discovery Expertise: Strong understanding of how audiences find and engage with content in streaming media environments, including the dynamics of personalization, recommendations, search, and curated programming.
• Established Practitioner: Experienced in designing, deploying, and optimizing personalization, recommendation, and search systems, with expertise in collaborating with ML teams to experiment with and evaluate model performance.
• Metrics-Driven and Outcomes-Focused: Ability to define, track, and deliver against KPIs tied to engagement, discovery, and consumption, with a history of driving measurable improvements such as increased minutes watched, higher CTR, broader content consumption, improved search success rates, and reduced time to engagement.
• Trusted Collaborator: Proven ability to build strong, productive relationships with engineers, ML specialists, curators, and cross-functional leaders.
• Strategic Partner: Can balance long-term vision with short-term execution, and making data-informed trade-offs in collaboration with other leaders.
• Clear Communicator: Able to articulate strategies, results, and recommendations to executives, peers, and partners across all domains.

About the Team

The SVOD Product team at Crunchyroll works to bring value to our fans through strategic product development that connects users with great stories and drives engagement growth. We focus on building experiences that help fans discover and enjoy more of the anime they love. Our work is deeply collaborative — partnering closely with engineering, design, data science, content, and other cross-functional teams to deliver features that inspire