A strangely compelling, but horribly flawed place to work.
Pros
Obviously the pros are that most people are motivated to serve the customers and the audience. Unfortunately, most of those people have left or were forced out, in the high double digits in the past six months. Crunchyroll is on life support, tech wise, but there are still some talented people repping the brand side. If you can work in marketing this is probably still an okay stepping stone, as long as you don't get invested. Total comp is average for the bay area.
Cons
Astroturfing reviews aside, this company has undoubtedly the worst-communicating leadership I've ever seen in my ~10 years in tech. Town halls have gone from being actual open discussions to one-way presentations, anonymous Q&A was nixed because they ran out of ways to dodge questions. ~20 talented engineers have left the company either because of reassignment, layoffs, or just plain incompetent management. There are almost no talented engineers left in San Francisco, leaving you to coordinate with a team based in Moldova. Management has broken promises over and over again that the SF team schedules would not be affected. Competency, creativity, and team velocities have taken a gigantic hit and although leadership is aware of the problem, they are attempting to wallpaper it over (perhaps in anticipation of a liquidity event) and just pushing problems further down the road rather than actually trying to fix them. Imagine all your tech stack, tech leads, and plain ol' production engineers are 6,000 miles away. Now realize that there's also a big time difference, non-native english difficulties, and the production problems that come when you're trying to build a new product. Now imagine reviewing code and not hearing back about changes or fixes until 12 hours later, and multiply this by everyday, and you have this huge tangled ball of problems, all because management saw engineers as replaceable robots. That is the reality at Ellation. It's not even the fault of the offshore engineers, but the offshoring process was NOT thought out, there was NO knowledge transfer from existing engineers, and almost all the talented engineers have left the company in the span of ~4 months. That is a really bad situation to walk into, which is why I'm writing this review in the first place. Just go in with your eyes open.