Director, Lifecycle Technology & Operations
Crunchyroll · Los Angeles, California, United States
About Crunchyroll
Founded by fans, Crunchyroll delivers the art and culture of anime to a passionate community. We super-serve over 100 million anime and manga fans across 200+ countries and territories, and help them connect with the stories and characters they crave. Whether that experience is online or in-person, streaming video, theatrical, games, merchandise, events and more, it’s powered by the anime content we all love.
Join our team, and help us shape the future of anime!
About the role
As the Director, Lifecycle Technology & Operations, you will lead the global operating model and technical foundation that enables Lifecycle Marketing to deliver personalized, data-driven customer experiences at scale.
You will oversee global Lifecycle Operations while serving as the primary Lifecycle business owner for our customer engagement and orchestration platform and the broader technology and data ecosystem that powers customer engagement. Today, Braze sits at the center of that ecosystem. You will define platform strategy and stewardship; journey and campaign operations; customer data and audience capabilities; personalization and decisioning; governance; automation; capacity; and partner delivery. This will build capabilities that can scale globally while supporting the needs of individual regions and markets.
Sitting at the intersection of Lifecycle Marketing, Marketing Technology, Data, Product, and Operations, this role combines ownership of the technical foundation that powers Lifecycle with leadership of the operating model that brings it to life. You will partner closely with Marketing, Martech, Product, Engineering, Data Engineering, Analytics, and regional teams, serving as the connective tissue among customer strategy, platform capabilities, data, and execution.
You will bring strong operational leadership with meaningful technical depth and experience operating at a global scale. You will help build the next stage of Lifecycle Marketing by building a high-performing global operation, shaping the Lifecycle technology roadmap, evolving our customer engagement and orchestration capabilities, diagnosing data and platform issues, and creating processes that enable global strategies to be efficiently localized across markets, languages, channels, and regulatory environments.
Core Areas of Responsibility
Lifecycle Technology & Platform Leadership
- Serve as the primary Lifecycle business owner and technical subject-matter expert for Braze and the broader Lifecycle technology ecosystem, with deep working knowledge of Braze Canvas and campaign architecture, Liquid, Catalogs, Connected Content and API integrations, segmentation, personalization, experimentation, channel configuration, and AI-enabled decisioning and orchestration capabilities; own platform strategy, governance, configuration standards, roadmap priorities, tooling, consumption, and ongoing platform health.
- Partner directly with Martech, Product, Engineering, and Data Engineering to define and operationalize the events, attributes, APIs, data contracts, and integrations required to build trigger-based Lifecycle journeys in Braze, including API-based ingestion and utilization of content and metadata to power real-time, contextually relevant intervention messaging across global and regional teams.
- Serve as Lifecycle’s dedicated partner to the Braze Technical Account team, leading enhancement discovery, technical recommendations, platform adoption, and roadmap planning; translate emerging Braze and AI capabilities into prioritized use cases and regularly share roadmap implications, recommendations, and enablement guidance with cross-functional Lifecycle Directors and Leadership.
- Establish best practices for journey architecture, event-driven messaging, segmentation, channel orchestration, experimentation, personalization, and reusable platform capabilities.
- Maintain a strong understanding of how our customer engagement and orchestration platform connects to Product, customer data platforms, content systems, analytics, reporting, and downstream destinations, and identify opportunities to improve or simplify the ecosystem.
Global Lifecycle Operations
- Lead the global operating model supporting Lifecycle teams and programs across regions and markets, including subscription journeys and automations, regional marketing, ecommerce, games, manga, theatrical, events, and the broader Crunchyroll fan ecosystem.
- Own the end-to-end operational process from intake and prioritization through audience development, campaign and journey build, QA, deployment, monitoring, and optimization.
- Build scalable campaign and journey operations that allow global strategies and capabilities to be efficiently adapted and localized across markets, languages, channels, and regulatory requirements while maintaining speed, quality, and consistency.
- Build and continuously improve a flexible delivery model across internal teams, regional resources, agency partners, offshore resources, specialized technical expertise, and automation.
- Establish clear standards for prioritization, capacity management, development, QA, launch readiness, documentation, incident management, and operational performance—continually improving speed, quality, reliability, and efficiency.
Lifecycle Data, Audiences & Personalization
- Own Lifecycle Marketing requirements for the events, attributes, audiences, preferences, behavioral signals, content data, and other customer inputs needed to power personalized experiences across markets.
- Partner with CDI, Data Engineering, Martech, Product, and Analytics to identify data gaps, improve signal quality and observability, and prioritize instrumentation and integration needs.
- Enable increasingly sophisticated audience creation, behavioral triggers, content affinity, personalization, decisioning, and next-best-action capabilities that can be applied globally while allowing for regional and market-level relevance.
- Translate customer and marketing strategies into clear data and technical requirements and help ensure Lifecycle-critical data is reliable, measurable, and fit for purpose.
Governance, Automation & Scale
- Reimagine and maintain global governance for customer communications, including messaging hierarchy, prioritization, frequency management, consent and preferences, suppression logic, and cross-channel coordination.
- Define scalable global standards for campaign quality, approvals, deliverability, accessibility, localization readiness, documentation, and operational controls, while accommodating market-specific requirements where needed.
- Identify and implement practical applications of automation and AI across audience creation, journey development, QA, personalization, content production, workflow management, reporting, and knowledge management.
- Continuously evaluate new platform capabilities and emerging technologies, helping move high-value opportunities from pilots into repeatable, scalable solutions across markets.
Team & Cross-Functional Leadership
- Build, develop, and lead a high-performing Lifecycle Technology & Operations team with strong capabilities across platform enablement, journey development, campaign operations, data quality, and operational governance.
- Manage agency and external partner performance across quality, throughput, cost, technical capability, service levels, and continuous improvement, building partners toward greater autonomy and accountability.
- Serve as a key connector between global Lifecycle Marketing, regional teams, and technical partners, translating marketing ambition into technical requirements while helping marketers understand platform capabilities, constraints, and opportunities.
- Influence cross-functional technology and data roadmaps by clearly articulating Lifecycle use cases, customer impact, regional requirements, dependencies, operational needs, and measurable business value.
In the r