Sr. Staff Data Scientist II - Viewer Experience

Job Summary: Lead the design and evolution of Discovery systems powering lifecycle progression across JioStar’s platform. Focus on architecting intelligent personalization across surfaces, enhancing content metadata and insights, dynamic page and tray ranking, boosting systems, and driving supply-side optimization to maximize engagement, viewing value, and subscription conversion.

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.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead the vision and strategy for recommendation algorithms across the JioStar platform, identifying opportunities to enhance personalization and content discovery
• Design and develop sophisticated recommendation models leveraging collaborative filtering, content-based techniques, deep learning, and hybrid approaches
• Lead initiatives to enrich and optimize content metadata through LLM-driven and 3P enrichment frameworks, improving discoverability and targeting precision.
• Translate complex business requirements into data science solutions, driving alignment across product, engineering, and business stakeholders
• Build evaluation frameworks and metrics that measure recommendation quality across dimensions including relevance, diversity, freshness, and business impact
• Solve discovery challenges around cold-start, multi-objective optimization (balancing engagement vs revenue vs novelty), and surface orchestration.
• Lead A/B testing and experimental design to validate algorithmic improvements and quantify business impact
• Develop novel approaches to recommendation challenges including cold-start problems, exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, and multi-objective optimization
• Collaborate closely with ML Engineering to ensure algorithms can be efficiently implemented at scale
• Analyze user behavior patterns to identify segments and personalization opportunities
• Mentor senior data scientists and lead the evolution of Discovery system design thinking across the organization.
• Stay current with research and industry best practices in personalization, lifecycle-based recommendation, metadata optimization, and content supply intelligence.

Skills and attributes for success:

• Deep expertise in personalization systems, surface ranking, boosting, and merchandising strategies.
• Strong background in lifecycle modeling, audience segmentation, and progression optimization frameworks.
• Knowledge of LLM-driven enrichment techniques and content metadata quality frameworks.
• Experience with user engagement modeling, retention curves, cohort behavior analysis, and progression journey mapping.
• Strong hands-on capability in Python, SQL, TensorFlow/PyTorch, and production experimentation frameworks.
• Familiarity with multi-objective optimization, exploration-exploitation strategies, and cold-start solutions.
• System design thinking for scalable discovery and personalization solutions at high concurrency.
• Strong leadership experience driving alignment across DS, Engineering, Product, and Content organizations.
• Experience delivering measurable business impact through lifecycle engagement strategies.

Preferred education and experience:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or related quantitative field with 10+ years of experience in applied data science, including at least 5 years working specifically with recommendation systems.
• Experience in streaming media, entertainment, or similar content platforms strongly preferred.

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.

JioStar is an equal opportunity employer. The company values diversity and its mission is to create a workplace where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work. The company ensures that the work environment is free from any discrimination against persons with disabilities, gender, gender identity and any other characteristics or status that is legally protected.