Principal Engineer, Engineering Practices
About The Position
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. 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. The Principal Engineer serves as a force multiplier through building frameworks, coaching technical leaders, and creating reusable patterns that allow teams to solve increasingly complex problems themselves. Success is measured not by the number of architectural decisions made personally, but by the growth of engineering capability, technical leadership, and organizational excellence across the Engineering organization.
Requirements
- 15+ years of experience in Software Engineering
- Strong Leadership skills. You raise the bar, lead by example, and mentor others
- Highly-collaborative. You influence through credibility over authority, working with all levels across the organization
- Technical expertise across the full stack, and are able to provide insights and guidance to front-end, back-end or infrastructure teams, when needed
- Experience designing, implementing and operating services at large scale
- Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior engineering, product, and business leaders
- Hands-on engineer that codes, knows how to validate designs, investigate difficult technical problems, and contribute directly to critical initiatives
- Able to distinguish and balance between long-term architectural direction and pragmatic delivery, knowing when to standardize, when to extend existing systems, and when a new approach is needed
- Skilled at defining architecture principles, patterns, and best practices that improve consistency, quality, and engineering velocity across multiple teams
- Can translate business strategy and product requirements into clear technical direction, identifying the capabilities, investments, and sequencing needed for long-term success
- Excel at strong architectural judgment and are able to evaluate tradeoffs across scalability, reliability, security, performance, cost, complexity, and time to market
Responsibilities
- 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 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.
Benefits
- 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!
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
