Viacom18 has announced significant additions to its technology leadership team, as the company looks to scale up its OTT platform JioCinema into one of the country’s foremost digital content destinations.
These strategic appointments are aimed at enhancing tech expertise, agility, and speed to market as the company continues to rapidly scale its operations and deliver world-class digital experiences.
Bharath Ram has joins as Chief Product Officer and Ad Tech Platform Lead. Ram brings extensive experience from Flipkart, where he led Product and Engineering functions for key charters including user growth, retention, new product innovation, and new categories.
Prior to Flipkart, he worked with Instagram, in the core product team in the US, focusing on ad revenue, ad auction systems, ad personalization, user experience with ads, and advertiser experience. He also worked at Amazon Prime Video where he led personalisation and other key areas. He holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Ohio State University and an MBA from Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
Bharath will be reporting to Kiran Mani, CEO – Digital, Viacom18.
Vijay Sheshadri has joined as Chief Technical Advisor. With over 25 years of industry experience, Sheshadri has an extensive background in enterprise security, e-commerce, and large-scale distributed systems. He was an Engineering Fellow at Swiggy and has held key roles at Amazon and Symantec, where he built several enterprise security solutions and cloud infrastructure services. He was the lead architect for Symantec’s Reputation-based Security technology, which won the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in 2010.
Shoury Bhardwaj joined as Engineering Leader for App Experience, Search, Recommendations, Data and App Backend Platforms. Bhardwaj comes from Flipkart, where he spent 12 years working on various key areas of e-commerce. In his most recent role, he led the product and engineering teams for new business initiatives. Bhardwaj is passionate about developer productivity, agile methodologies, and creating enduring technical and product blueprints. He holds an engineering degree from NIE, Mysore, and an MS from BITS, Pilani.
Commenting on these appointments, a Viacom18 spokesperson said, “We are thrilled to welcome Bharath, Vijay and Shoury to the Viacom18 family. Their expertise and leadership will be instrumental as we embark on the next phase of our ambitious growth journey. These appointments reflect our commitment to building a world-class tech platform that can deliver the best of content and an unparalleled experience to our consumers.”
