Senior Director - Engineering

Job Summary: As the Senior Director of Engineering – Discovery, you will own and define the end-to-end discovery experience for millions of users, spanning Personalization, Recommendations, Search, CMS, and Merchandising platforms. This role sits at the core of the user journey - determining how users find, explore, and engage with content at scale.

You will be responsible not just for execution, but for setting the long-term vision and strategy for discovery systems. You will lead a multi-disciplinary organization of engineering leaders, data scientists, and ML practitioners to build intelligent, scalable, and real-time systems that power content discovery across all surfaces.

About the team: At JioHotstar, the Viewer Experience (VX) org is at the heart of how millions discover, engage with, and fall in love with our platform. We own the end-to-end user journey—from first app launch to daily habit loops—across Search, Personalization, Watch Experience, Interactivity, and more. We blend world-class engineering, ML, design, and data to deliver a seamless, personalized, and engaging OTT experience at massive scale. If you're passionate about building immersive, intelligent, and performant user experiences that delight a billion users, join us in shaping the future of streaming.

The Discovery team drives the what to watch experience on Hotstar. We build intelligent systems that help users discover the right content at the right time through personalized recommendations, powerful search, and rich metadata. We combine deep user understanding with scalable infrastructure to ensure users find content they'll love—whether it's their next binge-worthy series, trending live sports, or hidden gems. Our systems operate at massive scale, handling billions of user interactions daily—including impressions, clicks, scrolls, watch events, and search queries.

Reporting To: VP, Engineering

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the long-term vision and strategy for Discovery, aligning it with overall business objectives
• Lead and scale a high-performing engineering and ML organization through layered leadership, including Engineering managers and Director
• Own the architecture of internet-scale, low-latency systems that power discovery for millions of users
• Drive the unification of recommendation systems (retrieval + ranking), search infrastructure (indexing + ranking + NLP), CMS platforms (metadata, tooling & workflows), and merchandising systems (rules, campaigns, experimentation) into a cohesive ecosystem
• Enable real-time personalization and contextual decision-making across discovery experiences
• Set the strategic direction for next-generation AI/ML systems, including multi-objective ranking, exploration vs. exploitation, and real-time inference
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Design, Business, and Content teams to align strategy with business goals
• Ensure operational excellence by improving system reliability, scalability, observability, cost efficiency, and experimentation velocity
• Foster a culture of ownership, innovation, and strong outcome orientation across teams

Skills and attributes for success

• Experienced in managing multiple software engineering teams (50+ engineers) running core AI/ML services and/or ML systems at scale
• Previous experience with hands-on work and shipping products in an AI and/or ML domain, like search, recommender systems, NLP, information retrieval, relevance, ranking, or large language models
• Hands-on architectural or distributed systems experience
• A strong track record of project delivery for large, cross-functional, projects and bringing in and growing engineering taent
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to present complex technical information clearly and concisely to a variety of audiences

Preferred education and experience:

Bachelors/Masters in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Machine Learning with 13+ years of experience in software development and 5+ years in leadership roles

About Us:

Perched firmly at the nucleus of spellbinding content and innovative technology, JioStar is a leading global media & entertainment company that is reimagining the way audiences consume entertainment and sports. Its television network and streaming service together reach more than 750 million viewers every week, igniting the dreams and aspirations of hundreds of million people across geographies.