JioHotstar taps top execs from Google, Flipkart, CRED, and Amazon Pay to power AI-driven streaming

JioHotstar is strengthening its product, engineering, and technology leadership to drive AI-powered, personalised streaming experiences, marking a major step in the platform’s next phase of growth. The company has onboarded senior executives from leading global technology firms to enhance capabilities across discovery, viewer experience, marketing intelligence, and platform engineering.

The new appointments bring experience from top consumer internet platforms, including Flipkart, Google, CRED, Razorpay, Myntra, ShareChat, and Cleartrip.

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The additions include Shrinivas SG (Discovery & Personalisation), Naveen Prashanth (Consumer Marketing), Abhishek Sharan (Engineering – Viewer Experience), Abhishek Varshney (AdTech), Chandru (Product Management), Chandramauli Singh, and Nishant Paliwal. Collectively, they strengthen JioHotstar’s discovery, engagement, monetisation, and engineering systems.

Key leadership hires

Shrinivas SG joins to lead discovery and personalisation, bringing deep expertise in building large-scale search and discovery platforms. He previously worked at Flipkart, where he focused on search, cataloguing, trends, and GenAI-powered conversational commerce, particularly in vernacular, voice, and video-led discovery.

Naveen Prashanth, joining from Google, will lead consumer marketing. He previously oversaw YouTube Shorts, Creator, and Artist Marketing in India, driving brand, performance, and monetisation initiatives. Prashanth also worked with McKinsey & Company, advising FMCG and B2C organisations on growth and transformation.

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

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Abhishek Varshney, joining from CRED, will strengthen advertising and monetisation technology. He spent nearly five years at CRED building products across payments, ordering, and financial engineering and has prior experience with Razorpay and Flipkart.

Chandramauli Singh and Nishant Paliwal, from ShareChat and Cleartrip respectively, bring expertise in recommendation systems, scalable platform architectures, and user engagement frameworks, further reinforcing JioHotstar’s product and engineering bench.

Further strengthening its product leadership, JioHotstar has also onboarded Chandru as Senior Vice President -- Product Management, where he will lead the product charter for Subscriptions and New Initiatives. With over 13 years of experience in building large-scale consumer and payment products, Chandru previously spent over a decade at Amazon Pay, where he played a key role in shaping consumer and payments ecosystems and building platforms used by millions of customers. Prior to Amazon Pay, he worked at Mu Sigma and is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore.

Focus on AI, analytics, and intelligent content

Earlier, David Zakkam joined JioHotstar to lead analytics and data strategy, driving data-led decision-making across the platform. More recently, Emmy Award-winner Stephen Bugaj was appointed Senior Vice President -- GenAI Content & Technology.

The expanded leadership team is expected to accelerate JioHotstar’s transition toward responsive, personalised, and intelligence-led streaming experiences, strengthening the platform as it scales to meet growing consumer expectations.