JioHotstar strengthens AI-focused product leadership

JioHotstar is expanding its product and engineering leadership as it works to develop AI-led capabilities that support more personalised streaming experiences at scale. As part of this effort, the platform has appointed several senior leaders from global consumer technology companies to strengthen discovery, viewer experience, marketing intelligence and platform engineering.

The new appointments bring experience from large internet platforms such as Flipkart, Google, CRED, Razorpay and Myntra. The leadership additions include Shrinivas SG in Discovery and Personalisation, Naveen Prashanth in Consumer Marketing, Abhishek Sharan in Engineering for Viewer Experience, Abhishek Varshney in AdTech, and Chandru in Product Management. Chandramauli Singh and Nishant Paliwal have also joined, collectively adding depth across discovery, engagement, monetisation and core engineering systems.

Shrinivas SG joins to lead discovery and personalisation, bringing experience in building large-scale search and discovery platforms. Previously at Flipkart, he worked across search, catalogue and trends, and contributed to the development of generative AI-based conversational commerce initiatives, with a focus on vernacular, voice and video-driven discovery.

Naveen Prashanth joins from Google, where he led YouTube Shorts, Creator and Artist Marketing in India, overseeing brand, performance and monetisation programmes. Prior to this, he worked at McKinsey & Company, advising FMCG and B2C organisations on growth and transformation initiatives.

On the engineering side, Abhishek Sharan brings more than 15 years of experience in building and scaling high-traffic consumer platforms. He has held leadership roles across the Flipkart Group and Myntra, working on systems spanning search, recommendations, applications, advertising and trust and safety. Most recently, he served as Head of Engineering at SuperMoney.

Strengthening advertising and monetisation technology, Abhishek Varshney joins from CRED, where he spent nearly five years developing products across payments, ordering and financial engineering. His earlier roles include work on application platforms at Razorpay and infrastructure platforms at Flipkart.

The product and engineering leadership team has also been bolstered by the addition of Chandramauli Singh and Nishant Paliwal, from ShareChat and Cleartrip respectively. Both bring experience in recommendation systems, scalable platform architectures and user engagement frameworks for large-scale consumer products.

As part of earlier leadership changes, David Zakkam joined JioHotstar to lead analytics and data strategy, with a focus on data-driven decision-making across the platform. The latest appointments were communicated internally, underscoring the company’s ongoing focus on strengthening its technology capabilities.

Separately, the JioStar Group recently announced the appointment of Emmy Award-winner Stephen Bugaj as Senior Vice President, GenAI Content & Technology. His role focuses on developing intelligent content workflows, interactive storytelling formats and scalable creative systems.

With an expanded leadership team in place, JioHotstar is positioning itself for its next phase of development as streaming platforms increasingly adopt more responsive, personalised and intelligence-driven user experiences.