Principal Engineer, Engineering Practices

About the Role

The Principal Engineer, Engineering Practices is a senior technical leader responsible for strengthening engineering excellence across Crunchyroll through technical strategy, architectural guidance, engineering best practices, and technical mentorship.

Reporting to the VP, Engineering Operations and Strategy, this role partners closely with Engineering Leadership, and Principal and Staff Engineers across all engineering domains to help shape the company's long-term technical strategy, while enabling engineering teams to make high-quality architectural decisions independently.

Core Areas of Responsibility

Drive Technical Strategy

• Partner with the SVP of Engineering and Engineering Leadership to translate business priorities into a long-term technical strategy
• Identify strategic technology investments that improve scalability, reliability, security, and developer productivity
• Help align technical initiatives across engineering domains while respecting domain ownership
• Evaluate emerging technologies, tools, and engineering practices that improve engineering effectiveness

Influence Architecture Through Guidance

• Develop reusable architectural patterns, reference implementations, and engineering guidance that teams can adopt
• Help teams evaluate architectural tradeoffs and make informed technical decisions
• Encourage consistency in service architecture through collaboration, education, and proven practices
• Facilitate technical design discussions for high-impact initiatives when appropriate

Build Engineering Capability

• Coach and mentor Principal, Staff, Senior, and emerging technical leaders across the Engineering organization
• Foster architectural thinking and strong technical decision-making within engineering teams
• Support career growth for senior technical contributors through mentorship and technical coaching
• Lead architecture workshops, technical learning sessions, and engineering forums
• Help cultivate the next generation of technical leaders across the organization

Drive Organizational Learning

• Capture institutional knowledge and transform it into reusable engineering guidance
• Develop technical documentation, architecture patterns, playbooks, and reference materials that reduce dependency on individual experts
• Identify recurring engineering challenges and partner with teams to create scalable solutions that benefit multiple domains
• Improve onboarding and knowledge transfer for engineers through documentation and education
• Promote a culture of continuous learning and technical curiosity throughout Engineering

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in Software Engineering
• Strong leadership skills with a proven track record of mentoring others and leading by example
• Highly collaborative mindset, influencing through credibility over authority
• Technical expertise across the full stack, providing guidance to front-end, back-end, or infrastructure teams
• Experience designing, implementing, and operating services at large scale
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Hands-on engineering skills to validate designs, investigate difficult technical problems, and contribute directly to critical initiatives
• Strong architectural judgment evaluating tradeoffs across scalability, reliability, security, performance, cost, and velocity
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar field, or equivalent experience