Vice President, Concepts Lab

In the role of VP, Concepts Lab, you will report to the SVP of Engineering.

We are considering applicants for the location(s) of San Francisco, CA or Los Angeles, CA.

We’re hiring a hands-on senior leader (VP) to own the strategy, portfolio, and execution of Concepts Lab. You’ll combine a founder’s entrepreneur mindset with deep product and technical skills, personally ideating and prototyping when it’s the fastest path, while scaling a small, elite team known for speed and impact. You’ll also incubate new ideas end-to-end, cutting across organizational lines and turning ambiguous opportunities into durable value. You will also stay closely connected to both industry trends and the R&D happening within our core stack and the broader Sony ecosystem to multiply your impact.  This role will require periodic travel to other US and International locations.

You will:

• Set the strategy and operating model for 0→1 innovation, from problem discovery to scaled adoption.
• Maintain a bias for action: ship small, learn fast, and either sunset or scale with clear success criteria.
• Serve as the connective tissue between executive priorities and engineering execution across platform and product domains.
• Serve as liaison between Crunchyroll and Sony R&D groups, connecting and finding creative uses of shared innovation.

• Define the innovation and incubation thesis, intake, and prioritization for Concepts Lab, aligning bets with company strategy, market signals, and measurable outcomes.
• Operate a transparent funnel (Idea → POC → Pilot → Venture/Production/Hand-off) with crisp go/no-go and funding gates.
• Run discovery sprints with cross-functional partners to frame problems, pressure-test riskiest assumptions, and pick the fastest paths to evidence.
• Continuously scan emerging technologies and platforms, share perspectives and investment theses that look ahead.
• Connect Sony R&D to our roadmap and look for opportunities to accelerate innovation, co-develop shared roadmaps, and prioritize “better together” bets.

• Spend meaningful time building: prototyping services, integrations, automation, and developer tools (expect ~25–40% hands-on during early phases).
• Provide architectural direction for POCs and pilots.
• Set AI/LLM best practices for applied use cases (prompting, evals, safety/guardrails, vector stores, retrieval, fine-tuning) and developer productivity tooling.
• Learn and deeply understand our core platform stack (services/APIs, data/ML, edge/embedded, observability, compute, networking, etc.).

• Move validated concepts into production with delivery teams, ensuring clean handoffs, thorough documentation, and operational readiness.
• Establish a lightweight SDLC for experiments (trunk-based, automated testing, ephemeral environments, telemetry).
• Track and report lab KPIs with crisp narratives for executives.

• Hire, coach, and retain a mission-driven, senior-leaning team (principal engineers, product-minded builders, applied AI specialists).
• Model a culture of kaizen, courage, service, and curiosity, celebrate learnings, not just wins.
• Create repeatable playbooks for rapid prototyping and internal tool adoption across the org.

• Manage budget, vendor evaluations, and build-vs-buy decisions.
• Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and legal standards while moving fast.
• Codify IP and knowledge capture to accelerate future work.

We get excited about candidates, like you, because...

Must-Haves

• You have 12+ years in software engineering with 5+ years leading high-impact teams (Sr Director/VP scope) delivering products and platforms.
• You have demonstrated 0→1 leadership: created and scaled new products, internal tools, or developer platforms with measurable business impact.
• You possess strong hands-on technical depth across cloud (AWS/GCP), services/APIs, data systems, CI/CD, observability, and modern developer workflows.
• You have practical GenAI/LLM experience (shipping AI-powered features or building productivity tooling), including evaluation frameworks and safety guardrails.
• You have exceptional storytelling and influence skills; proven cross-functional leadership with Product, Design, and Business Development.
• You demonstrate bias for action: you unblock, you ship, you simplify.
  

Nice-to-Haves

• You have prior experience running a venture/incubation program, skunkworks, or internal platform/enablement org.
• You have domain familiarity with streaming, subscriptions, payments, personalization/search, or client applications.
• You possess a proven track record standardizing developer productivity tools and practices across a large engineering org.
• You have prior experience with hardware development and software and hardware bridge (firmware), ability to partner on reference designs and rapid hardware prototyping when needed.

Concepts Lab is our applied innovation team. It rapidly validates new product concepts, builds internal tools that boost developer productivity, and works with our delivery teams to bring the best concepts into production. The team also jumps into critical initiatives to unblock delivery when the business needs it most.

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-Hybrid