Staff Data Engineer

About the role

In the role of Staff Data Engineer for Concepts Lab, you will report to the VP of the Concepts Lab.

We are considering applicants for the location of Los Angeles, CA (onsite).

As the Staff Data Engineer for Concepts Lab, you will be the technical anchor for everything data in the lab: designing and building the pipelines, reports, and tooling that turn raw signals from experiments into insights that shape our roadmap. 

You will move fluidly between hands-on analytics work, and partnership with PMs, designers, and engineers across the company. Success in your first year looks like a Concepts Lab where every new idea has a clear, trustworthy path from question to data to decision and where the team ships faster because of the foundation you have built.

Core Areas of Responsibility

• Own the reliability of AI systems in the lab, including designing eval frameworks, instrumenting observability for LLM-based pipelines, and building the validation and structured-output layers that make model outputs trustworthy. 
• Architect and build the end-to-end data foundation for Concepts Lab on Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark, Databricks SQL), spanning ingestion from AWS and GCP sources through to curated, analytics-ready datasets.
• Lead data modeling and transformation work by defining the dimensional models, semantic layers, and metrics that the lab and our partners across Crunchyroll rely on for experimentation and decision-making.
• Perform hands-on analytics: write the SQL, build the dashboards, and run the exploratory analyses that turn lab concepts into evidence, partnering directly with PMs and product leaders on the questions that matter.
• Set the technical bar for the lab’s data work, including design reviews, code quality, observability, cost management, and security practices, and mentor engineers and analysts who collaborate with us.
• Partner across teams to move successful concepts from prototype into production, working at the inflection point between central Data and Platform teams and upstream and downstream Software Engineering teams to hand off systems that scale beyond the lab.

About You

We get excited about candidates, like you, because…

• You have 12+ years of professional experience building production data systems, with a track record of operating as a senior individual contributor or technical lead.
• You have hands-on experience making AI systems production-grade by designing trace-based evaluations, instrumenting observability for LLM pipelines (with tools like LangSmith, Langfuse, or Datadog), and enforcing structured outputs in real production environments.
• You possess deep expertise in Databricks, including Spark (PySpark and/or Scala), Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Databricks SQL.
• You are equally strong in SQL and dimensional data modeling, and have shipped warehouse layers and semantic models that analysts and stakeholders actually trust and use.
• You write production-grade Python and have built data pipelines with modern orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, dbt, or similar) on AWS and/or GCP.
• You have done substantive analytics work yourself beyond just enabling others and can take an ambiguous business question and drive it to a clear, data-supported answer.
• You have experience working in early-stage, ambiguous environments where you define the problem as much as you solve it, and you know when to prototype quickly versus when to build for the long term.

Nice to Have

• Experience in media, streaming, or gaming
• Experience working in an innovation lab, incubation environment, or R&D organization
• Experience with Datadog, Mixpannel, and Mux

About the Team

The Concepts Lab is Crunchyroll’s R&D and incubation group, focused on exploring new ideas, technologies, and experiences for anime fans. The team partners closely with engineering, product, and business leaders to test assumptions, build evidence, and transition validated concepts into delivery teams.

Our work spans early discovery through beta execution, with an emphasis on learning quickly, reducing risk, and setting teams up for long-term success.

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-onsite