MAM
JioHotstar hires top tech leaders to boost AI-powered streaming
Senior leaders from Google, Flipkart, CRED and others join as platform bets on personalisation and scale
MUMBAI: JioHotstar is bulking up its technology muscle, snapping up senior talent from Google, Flipkart, Amazon Pay, CRED and other consumer-tech names as it pivots towards AI-driven, personalised streaming at scale. The hiring spree signals a clear shift: the streaming wars are no longer just about content, but about intelligence, discovery and monetisation.
The platform said it is strengthening product leadership and engineering depth to build what it calls the next phase of “intelligent, personalised streaming”. The new team spans discovery, viewer experience, marketing intelligence, adtech and platform engineering, areas increasingly critical as competition intensifies.
Among the key hires, Shrinivas SG joins as svp for discovery and personalisation. Previously at Flipkart, Shrinivas SG worked across search, catalogue and trends, and helped build GenAI-powered conversational commerce with a focus on vernacular, voice and video-led discovery.
Naveen Prashanth comes in as svp for consumer marketing from Google, where he led YouTube Shorts, creator and artist marketing in India, driving brand, performance and monetisation at scale. Earlier, he worked at McKinsey & Company advising FMCG and B2C firms on growth and transformation.
On the engineering side, Abhishek Sharan joins as svp for engineering, viewer experience. With over 15 years’ experience, he has built and scaled high-traffic consumer platforms across the Flipkart group and Myntra, working on search, recommendations, applications, advertising systems and trust and safety. Most recently, he was head of engineering at SuperMoney.
Adtech gets a boost with Abhishek Varshney as principal engineer. He arrives from CRED after nearly five years building payments, ordering and financial engineering products. His earlier stints include Razorpay and Flipkart, where he worked on application and infrastructure platforms.
The wider product and engineering bench is reinforced by Chandramauli Singh and Nishant Paliwal, from ShareChat and Cleartrip respectively, bringing expertise in recommendation systems, scalable architectures and user engagement frameworks. Chandramauli Singh also joins the product team.
The data backbone is being tightened too. David Zakkam had earlier joined to lead analytics and data strategy, pushing data-led decision-making across the platform. The latest appointments were shared internally, underlining a sustained focus on tech capability.
At the group level, JioStar recently brought in Emmy Award-winner Stephen Bugaj as svp for GenAI content and technology, with a mandate spanning intelligent content pipelines, interactive storytelling and scalable creative frameworks.
Scale is already on JioHotstar’s side. The platform claims 450 million monthly average users and a library exceeding 300,000 hours of programming across 19 languages, covering films, originals, live sport, events, anime, kids’ content and shows from more than 100 JioStar channels.
As streaming matures, the battleground is shifting from who has the most titles to who knows the viewer best. JioHotstar’s message is blunt: in the attention economy, algorithms are as important as actors. And the next big hits may be coded as much as they are created.
MUMBAI: In India’s fast-moving payments race, Visa has just swiped in a new leader. The company has named Suresh Sethi as its India country head, marking a key leadership shift as it sharpens its focus on digital payments growth in the market. Sethi steps into the role following his recent exit from Protean eGov Technologies, where he served as chief executive officer. He succeeds Sandeep Ghosh, who has moved on after more than four years at Visa to pursue an external opportunity.
The appointment comes at a time when Visa is doubling down on its expansion strategy across India and the wider region, deepening partnerships and accelerating adoption in an increasingly competitive digital payments ecosystem.
Sethi brings with him a broad, cross-market perspective shaped by decades of experience across corporate banking, retail financial services, mobile money and large-scale government technology initiatives. He began his career at Citigroup, where he spent 14 years working across India, Africa, South America and the United States, focusing on transaction banking services within the corporate bank.
His appointment signals a blend of institutional experience and market familiarity qualities that could prove critical as Visa navigates a landscape where fintech innovation, regulatory evolution and consumer adoption are all accelerating at once.
As digital payments in India continue to scale rapidly, the leadership change underscores a simple reality, in a market where every tap, scan and swipe counts, who leads the charge can matter just as much as the technology itself.
