In the Built By Fans, For Fans video that highlighted how much the streaming service has changed since it started almost a decade ago, one of the employees at Crunchyroll yelled out, “We need more engineers!”
That prompted a question: Why does Crunchyroll need more engineers?
From talking to the person who yelled that — Natalie Swezda — and other engineers at Crunchyroll, it will only help bring in fans around the world to see the anime they want to watch legally.
Natalie got into the anime game when she happened to play Pokemon Red and discovered the anime soon after that. When middle school rolled around, Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z graced her TV screen, but it wasn’t until she discovered Inuyasha (and its cursing) that she surfed the internet to find that anime is not all just for kids. “It was actually for teens and adults, and there was some adultish content in there,” she remarked when thinking back to those days. That was when she was hooked.
The game of getting into engineering…well, as she grew up, it wasn’t a game. It wasn’t even her college major. “I went to school for a degree in Chemistry.” This, as she talked about seeing her friends who studied computer science either getting jobs quickly and working at Google and Microsoft, made her realize she was in the wrong field. “That sounds much more exciting than 7 years of grad school!” So she took CS classes, did some IOS and flash game tutorials, and got to work at a video game company.
She then learned that Crunchyroll, who established themselves in San Francisco, was looking for engineers. She hasn’t looked back since she was hired in 2013.
***
Before her time at Crunchyroll, the service continued to shred it’s contentious nature of uploading illegal fansubs by working with more companies in Japan. By that point, it was probably the sole standard of anime simulcasting; in 2013, FUNimation was recovering from the failed Nico Nico partnership that would have solved their simulcasting woes, Hulu would have to deal with certain titles being held back a week or so due to FUNimation and Sentai holding distribution rights and deal with ads playing on their service despite paying, and Neon Alley pursued a dub only market. Other countries were doing what they could, but it was all too convenient to either pay $6.95 and watch the latest anime every week on Crunchyroll, or just use fansubs.
Basically, the streaming market was barren.
Today? It has changed. Daisuki for better or worse; FUNimation has revamped their site to a point where they’re streaming more anime than they ever have before; places outside of the states like AnimeLab have beefed up their content; and upstart Viewster is stepping into the ring to provide another alternate service to people who want to watch anime.
Crunchyroll, on the other hand, has grown bigger. From 50 or 60 people working in the offices when Natalie started, there’s now around 150 employees today. That means scaling and understanding how can they continue to support millions of anime fans around the world and not sacrifice quality or break the site. That part about breaking the site is big, since that is one of the issues that requires more helping hands — after all, Crunchyroll was founded in 2006.
“The original base code is start up code,” said Maria Mora, a Full Stack Developer at Crunchyroll, which now means, “with a bigger site, that means updated standards, best practices, and security have to be better.”
Unlike Natalie, Maria would be coding one way or another, and all it took was Geosites, Frontpage (now defunct), and a VTech Laptop designed for kids that had John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz’s Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) installed to get her hooked on coding. She found an opportunity to work at Crunchyroll on Craigslist, and joined the company in January after working at Spacehitch. She’s been able to do maintenance and new features on the website, but working around that start up code presents a challenge for a company that’s not a startup anymore.
Chris Bianco, Senior Software Engineer, mentioned that as I asked him why the company needs more engineers. As someone who started a startup after college, Chris acknowledged that Crunchyroll has changed where the service now has to serve anime to many people in a lot of different places. And it’s not as simple as getting rid of old features, since that can break some other features on the site.
“We’re in a pretty big transitory period between scrappy startup and more established enterprise shop,” mentioned Chris Lee, who works in the Internal Teams department as a Senior Software Engineer at Crunchyroll. He never expected to work there, since games were his thing. “I wanted to make video games. Really, really badly. I did nothing but prepare to get a job in the video game industry when I was 9.” But, as someone who had been a fan of Crunchyroll, when he learned from a co-worker that Crunchyroll was in the area and hiring, he had to change his plans. Now that he’s there, he is part of a team that makes and supports many of the tools the engineers need to use across many teams.
He’s also a part of a company growing in size, but they still have code that remains from the early days — and one mistake could bring forth major video problems. That’s what happened to Natalie, where one problem with a programming language prevented a good amount of users to not see any subtitles when watching a show. “So whenever I pushed any flash player live,” she said as she described how she learned from that experience, “I would wait. I’d be around the next few hours checking the forums, Twitter, customer service, ‘Are we getting complaints, any problems,’ and if there ever were I would prepare to roll back.”
So, the problem is simple. Now, why would getting more engineers solve this problem?
Not surprisingly, getting more senior engineers would be a boon. “We particularly need people at the senior level,” especially Senior Development Operations, said Natalie. “That will help us scale. If we want to get more users and subscriptions, and put more shows on Crunchyroll, then we need to build a technical infrastructure, or like server farms that can support this stuff.” Would that be able to bring audiences outside of the U.S.? It would actually!
…With caveats. Obviously, international rights are handled based on what gets licensed, but by getting someone that’s done Development Operations for a long time it can help scale the business, and getting more video and encoding engineers will allow them to encode more videos and handle different subtitles for each region. One problem Natalie elaborated on was an anime that’s subtitled. “You have a button that you want to put a word on, and that word might be really short in English, but it’s 25 letters long in German.” That button can only hold 15 characters. That makes the need for more engineers important if it wants to serve an international audience.
But more engineers will only make it easier for the over 30 member team, added Chris Bianco.
“We can focus on optimizing our core platform, develop better tools for publishers and translators, add more detailed performance metrics to gauge what users like or don’t care about, and add new features or overhaul existing ones.”
For Natalie, the bottom line can count, and getting a senior engineer in will only make the company better. “We’re looking for someone that can ramp up reasonably quickly, won’t need a lot of management, or someone to come over to them every day and helping them through tickets.
“We’re really looking for engineers that are able to lead more junior engineers.”
***
Evan Minto started his engineering path as a kid, when he was making websites and with his dad heavily entrenched into graphic design. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a Computer Science degree, he needed a job. He started looking for some in the video game and VFX space, but didn’t have much luck. That was when his time critiquing anime as the creator of Ani-Gamers helped. “I had a contact from Crunchyroll through my work covering the anime industry, so I asked him for a recommendation.”
And as he concluded, after getting sent on a plane to interview for the Front End Web Development position in San Francisco (he lived in NJ), “The rest is history.” Now he helps build the interface that users see and interact with on the site. And since starting there two years ago, Crunchyroll has been great for him. “We’ve built up a pretty friendly office culture, and the company is full of exceptionally nerdy people in every department.” For example, he talked about a product designer who has a habit of drawing Doraemon on every whiteboard she could find. “We really value that passion, since people who are already part of our audience can provide really useful insights into features we should pursue.”
That is very interesting to say, since, not everyone is into anime. In writing for a column on this site, he talked about his journey on joining Crunchyroll and what he does, but he mentioned this:
But not everybody at Crunchyroll likes anime either. Some of our coworkers joined us because they were interested in the work itself, whether it’s development, design, or marketing. The truth is, only certain departments require their employees to be anime fans — everybody else can still contribute meaningfully by simply solving the problems that they’re good at solving.
So is it worrisome for a potential engineer that they might have to know about anime to work at Crunchyroll? Well, as Evan mentioned in that line, and from talking to other engineers, it’s not a factor.
“Engineers are interviewed and assessed purely for their engineering capabilities,” said Natalie when I mentioned this to her. “If you’re a great engineer and you know your craft well, it doesn’t really matter if you like anime or not. That’s not going to hurt you in the job interview.”
“Don’t feel intimidated by assumptions,” said Maria, who echoes what Natalie said. “You don’t have to be addicted to anime/manga, know Japanese, be a gamer, or anything like that. We have a lot of people here with various interests.”
“It is a really chill place to be around, and I found that I fit in almost immediately, “ said Chris Bianco. “The engineers all have a vision of how the site should be, and we have product managers, designers, brand managers, and so on feel strongly as well. Just come prepared to talk about your interests, and try to keep a low ego. One of the best parts about working here is that everyone, including the VP of Engineering, likes to work together and hang out.”
So it all comes down to a few things:
- A Senior Engineer would be crucial.
- A Senior Development Operations person would be great.
- You don’t have to like anime to join the company. You can like something else.
After that, it comes down to whether or not you can handle the workload and the office, which has French bulldogs and a Corgi.
“I mean if you don’t like dogs they stay in their (pens) so they won’t bother you,” said Natalie, “but it’s a really nice office. They’ve done a really good job with the décor, there’s a ton of couches and nap pods…it’s a nice place to work.
“So whether you like anime or not, it’s a cushy engineering job.”
