Senior Applied Scientist

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!

We are hiring an Applied Scientist to help advance personalization across the Crunchyroll ecosystem. In this role, you will lead the scientific development of recommendation, ranking, and decisioning solutions that improve how fans discover and engage with anime series/movies, manga, merchandise, games, and other areas in the anime fandom. You will partner closely with Machine Learning Engineers, Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Content stakeholders to make Crunchyroll the ultimate destination for anime experience.

In the role of Senior Applied Scientist for Recommendation and Personalization, you will report to the Director of Data Science and Machine Learning in our Center for Data and Insights. You will own the research and applied science agenda for personalization, from problem framing and data exploration through model development, evaluation, experimentation, and iteration. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys combining strong scientific rigor with product thinking to improve user discovery, engagement, retention, and long‑term fan value.

You will work across multiple user touchpoints, including app and web interfaces, lifecycle and promotional email campaigns, and flywheels that connect video, ecommerce, manga, and adjacent experiences. You will help define what great personalization looks like at Crunchyroll, build the evidence to prove impact, and collaborate with engineering partners to ensure the resulting solutions can be productionized effectively.

This position is based in our Los Angeles office, but we will consider our San Francisco office as a secondary location. We work a hybrid schedule, in‑office three days a week:
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

• Lead the research and development of recommendation, ranking, retrieval, and personalization methods tailored to Crunchyroll use cases across streaming, manga, ecommerce, and lifecycle marketing surfaces.
• Frame ambiguous business and product questions into clear scientific problems, hypotheses, success metrics, and experimentation plans.
• Design and run robust offline evaluation frameworks for recommender systems, including relevance, diversity, novelty, coverage, calibration, and long‑term value metrics.
• Partner with Product, Analytics, and Engineering to define online experiments, interpret results, and turn learnings into roadmap decisions and model improvements.
• Develop user, content, and contextual understanding through feature design, representation learning, segmentation, and behavioral analysis.
• Prototype and evaluate a range of approaches, including collaborative filtering, content-based methods, sequence modeling, deep learning, bandits, causal or uplift methods, and LLM-enabled recommendation techniques where appropriate.
• Analyze user feedback loops and cross‑domain interactions to improve discovery across video, merchandise, manga, and other ecosystem experiences.
• Work closely with Machine Learning Engineers to translate promising research into production-ready solutions on our in-house recommendation platform.
• Communicate scientific findings, model tradeoffs, and business implications clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Help establish best practices for experimentation, reproducibility, model governance, and scientific documentation within the personalization and recommendations function.

We get excited about candidates, like you, because you have:

Experience: You bring 5+ years of experience in applied machine learning, recommendation systems, search/ranking, experimentation, or a closely related area, with a track record of driving measurable product impact.

Scientific Depth: Yo…