JIOHOTSTAR is reinforcing its product, engineering and technology capabilities as it lays the groundwork for the next phase of AI-driven, personalised streaming at scale. As part of this strategic move, the platform has brought in several senior leaders from leading global and Indian technology firms.
The new appointments span key areas such as discovery and personalisation, consumer marketing, viewer experience, AdTech, product management and platform engineering. The hires include Shrinivas SG joining as senior vice president – discovery and personalisation, Naveen Prashanth as senior vice president – consumer marketing, Abhishek Sharan as senior vice president – engineering (viewer experience), Abhishek Varshney as principal engineer – adtech, chandru as senior vice president – product management along with Chandramauli Singh joining the product team and Nishant Paliwal strengthening platform engineering.
Shrinivas SG brings experience in building large-scale search and discovery systems. Prior to joining JioHotstar, he worked at Flipkart across search, catalogue and trends, and played a key role in developing GenAI-powered conversational commerce solutions, with a focus on vernacular, voice and video-led discovery.
In the consumer growth and engagement space, Prashanth joins from Google, where he led marketing for YouTube Shorts, Creators and Artists in India, driving brand, performance and monetisation initiatives. Earlier, he worked with McKinsey & Company, advising FMCG and B2C organisations on growth and transformation programmes.
On the engineering side, Sharan brings more than 15 years of experience in building and scaling high-traffic consumer platforms. Before joining JioHotstar, he held leadership roles across the Flipkart Group and Myntra, working on systems covering search, recommendations, applications, advertising platforms, and trust and safety. Most recently, he served as head of engineering at SuperMoney.
Further strengthening advertising and monetisation technology, Varshney joins from CRED, where he spent nearly five years developing products across payments, ordering and financial engineering. His earlier roles included work on application platforms at Razorpay and infrastructure systems at Flipkart.
The product and engineering leadership bench is also being bolstered by Singh and Paliwal, who join from ShareChat and Cleartrip respectively, bringing experience in recommendation systems, scalable platform architecture and user engagement for large-scale consumer products.
As part of earlier leadership moves, David Zakkam joined JioHotstar to lead analytics and data strategy, driving data-led decision-making across the platform. Additionally, the JioStar Group recently appointed Emmy Award-winning Stephen Bugaj as senior vice president – GenAI content and technology, underlining its focus on advanced content pipelines, interactive storytelling formats and scalable creative frameworks.
