Principal Product Manager, Search & Content Understanding

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.

In the role of Principal Product Manager, you will report to the SVP Product - Core Services. This is a hybrid role (in office Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays) based in either Dallas or Los Angeles.

Key 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 various experiences team including SVOD, Game Vault, Ecomm store, 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 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,