Principal Data Scientist

Job Title: Principal Data Scientist

Department Level: Viewer Experiences

Location: Onsite Bangalore

Work Type: Full time

Job Summary: We believe personalization is the operating system of the customer experiencenot just a recommendation engine. As a Principal Data Scientist you will define the scientific vision and technical strategy for an AI-native personalization platform that powers Search Recommendations Homepage Ads and Notifications for millions of users. This is a high-impact leadership role where your work will directly influence customer engagement retention and Watch Time Per User (WTPU) while setting the direction for one of the industrys most advanced personalization ecosystems. If youre passionate about building AI systems at massive scale and solving complex customer problems this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact.

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 journeyfrom first app launch to daily habit loopsacross 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 youre passionate about building immersive intelligent and performant user experiences that delight a billion users join us in shaping the future of streaming.

Key responsibilities:

• Define the personalization vision: Lead the evolution of JioHotstars AI-native personalization platform by designing systems that continuously understand every content we carry on the platform who the customer is what they intend to consume and what they are most likely to value next enabling seamless personalization across Search Recommendations Homepage Ads and Notifications.

• Architect next-generation AI systems: Build scalable real-time personalization solutions using representation learning foundation models sequential user modeling multimodal intelligence semantic retrieval and continuously learning systems.

• Solve personalization at scale: Drive innovation in customer understanding intent prediction cold-start real-time recommendations exploration vs. exploitation diversity and low-latency decision-making

• Build Platforms Not Models: Develop foundational capabilities such as unified user and content representations experimentation frameworks feature platforms and real-time inference services. Drive organizational thinking beyond optimizing isolated algorithms toward building continuously learning intelligence systems.

• Lead scientific excellence: Partner with Product Engineering Analytics and Business leaders to define long-term AI strategy

• Develop Talent & Technical Excellence: Mentor senior data scientists influence architectural decisions champion AI-native ways of working and establish scientific rigor across experimentation measurement and platform development

Skills and attributes for success:

• Proven experience building and operating large-scale production personalization or search systems serving millions of users

• Demonstrated success translating scientific innovation into measurable customer and business outcomes

• Deep expertise in representation learning behavioral embeddings and sequential user modeling for personalization.

• Strong understanding of semantic retrieval search ranking and recommendation systems at scale.

• Hands-on experience with Foundation Models Transformers LLMs and multimodal AI.

• Knowledge of contextual bandits reinforcement learning causal inference and long-term optimization techniques.

• Experience building real-time ML systems including streaming pipelines feature stores vector retrieval online inference experimentation frameworks and model serving.

• Strong engineering mindset with the ability to translate cutting-edge research into scalable production-grade AI solutions.

• Excellent product intuition with a focus on solving customer problems and delivering measurable business impact.

• Proven ability to thrive in ambiguous environments solve complex problems from first principles and influence cross-functional teams through technical leadership

Preferred education and experience:

Bachelors/Masters in Statistics Computer Science Computer Engineering or Machine Learning with 12 years of experience in Machine Learning Data Science Personalization Search or/and Recommendation Systems.

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.