Discovery DTC’s India Development Centre
Nitin Kapur, VP Engineering & Head of the India Development Centre, shares the ambitious vision for Discovery’s India Dev. Centres in Bangalore and Pune, and the essential role they play in building the global platform that powers Discovery’s entire portfolio of products around the world!
The India Development Centre (IDC) is fundamental to the build of our global technology platform, which powers our entire suite of products worldwide. Our offices in Bangalore and Pune are established as the company’s Centres of Excellence for some of our most complex domain challenges, including our Global Video Platform and Ad Tech, and are tasked with engineering sophisticated, cutting-edge solutions. The work done by our teams in India is central to creating an industry leading consumer experience, reaching over 200 million superfans worldwide.
Of course, establishing and scaling the offices in India isn’t easy. Below our VP Engineering and Head of the IDC, Nitin Kapur, talks about the technical nuances of building a platform for Discovery+, the tech culture he’s trying to foster, and the vision for Discovery in India
What is your role at Discovery?
I’m VP Engineering and Site Leader for Discovery DTC (our technology business) in India. My role is to establish Discovery’s India Development Centre, which I’m incredibly excited about, given the impact the Centre will have on the global Discovery organization.
What is the vision for India within the tech org?
India will be the Centre of Excellence for technology verticals such as Advertising Technology, Global Video Platform, TV Everywhere (Go) front-end apps as well as other areas that are critical to the success of our global streaming platform. Our platform will power everything from immersive lifestyle experiences with live cooking classes, to high traffic sporting experiences like the 2021 Olympic games. Imagine millions of simultaneous viewers streaming the Olympics and the Premier League across Europe. Customers expect a seamless video experience, which requires exceptional engineering talent, one of the many reasons we’re building this hub in India.
Our strategy is to have a globally distributed team of exceptional Engineers, Product & Program Managers across key markets, known for engineering talent. We already have development centers in Seattle, New York, London, Stockholm, Singapore and now India.
Discovery is known across the world for its amazing content, but less is known about our technology organization. What role does technology play in the Discovery ecosystem?
Television & media consumption is on a transformational journey! We’ve seen OTT (video streaming) become the main source of content consumption. Engineering is at the helm of this digital transformation, so to answer your question, technology has become core to Discovery’s business in addition to Content. Discovery has an audience reach of 3 billion viewers across 200+ countries, and we are building a Global Video Streaming Platform to support all of our networks’ brands globally. This is an incredibly complex and exciting challenge for our tech teams.
That’s all very exciting! What are some of the technical nuances of building for a product like Discovery+ with multiple genres vs. some competitors with single genre products?
In terms of scale, this platform will house 100,000+ hours of content, as well as live viewing, catering to millions of simultaneous viewers. This will be across not just multiple genres but also multiple product lines with different business models e.g. Discovery+ US, India, UK & EU, TV Everywhere/Go, Eurosport, GCN etc, each having its unique CX needs and requiring ongoing enhancements. For example, delivering EPG that has its own UI and performance challenges owing to schedule accuracy & aggregation. Similarly, achieving 99th Percentile latency of <50 milliseconds for the desired scale (e.g. 100+ million queries per second) without throwing more hosts is another challenge. Content ingestion, processing, transcoding & Ad-insertion at scale & then having state of the art recommendations driven by AL/ML are few other nuances.
Do you have a philosophy on optimal engineering team sizes? How will these teams operate with the rest of the organization?
We operate in a Pod structure, with engineering teams of no more than 7 to 10, working autonomously with end-to-end ownership. It’s important that these pods are self-sufficient, though there will always be some overlap with the existing development centers in the US and UK/EU since we operate in a distributed computing environment with services teams spread across geographies. We’re also always thinking about how to collaborate with different time zones in the most efficient way.
Now, let’s switch gears and talk a bit about you. Why did you join Discovery?
Two reasons.
First, I have always been fascinated with building best-in-class technology platforms, at scale, and Discovery’s OTT development was taking this vision to the next level. While this is very similar to the mobile-app development backed up by micro services, the OTT aspect is far more technically complicated by virtue of Scale, Latency, low-memory devices & CX, all of which challenged me to get outside of my comfort zone.
Secondly, our industry is still in its infancy and going through a rapid evolution. You may recall the state of Mobile Apps post 2010 or the prior evolutions like Web 1.0 to 2.0., OTT development is going through a similar journey right now. It’s very exciting being at the forefront of driving that kind of industry shift.
Your previous role was with one of the giants of the tech industry, with well-established teams and processes. What has it been like building from the ground up at Discovery?
Well, it has been very challenging and equally rewarding. Building from the ground up is not new for me. I joined Audible (now Amazon) in 2013 when it was a ~250 people company and did not yet have well established engineering teams or processes. I started with building out the Technical Product Management group and then the Engineering teams, established a leadership bench and the supporting processes (like job ladders, IC to Manager transition & leveling guides). By the time I left Audible, we were a 2500+ ppl strong company. The opportunity to rebuild an Engineering organization in Discovery (which was less known for its technology) and OTT platforms were the main reasons I joined Discovery. I knew we were launching Discovery+ in year one, which means we would need to build the New York team and product simultaneously. Layer in the scale at which we’re building, and of course doing this in the midst of the global pandemic…that’s why I said that it has been one of the most challenging moments of my career, but also one of the most rewarding.
How would you describe your leadership /working style?
I subscribe to the servant-leader philosophy. In my early days as a manager, I was a scrum master & trainer which has helped me become a better leader. Yes, I can talk about software-engineering all day, but I am in the business of people and hence I see my role as helping others to succeed and be as effective as possible.
How would you describe the tech culture you’re trying to build?
Simply put, we want to build a culture of strong engineering excellence. By this, I mean engineering teams not only drive feature work, but also have a full understanding of the customer experience, which then leads to roadmap ownership, mindset of configuration to enable scale and finally a solid command on their operations — observability metrics, monitoring, alerts — in order to stay one step ahead of any customer problems.
People and our collaborative culture is the other important aspect. We are a very people-centric organization and we want to continue over-indexing on building to one’s strengths to grow our talent.
What kind of behaviors help individuals thrive in this team?
First, we have a high technical bar — going beyond good programming skills by designing for both scale and high performance. Second, our engineers have low-egos and a strong bias for problem-solving. Finally, we strongly value curiosity, as it drives day-to-day learning that makes us passionate about what we deliver.
How has the experience of working fully remote during COVID-19 been for you and the team?
Like most, it’s been an adjustment, but as a global organization we already had a lot of the infrastructure in place to support this way of working. This past year, we’ve significantly increased the size of our global engineering team and launched Discovery+ in two of our largest markets and so I’d say we’ve done pretty well! Yes, there have been many learnings, the top ones being a) work-life balance, specifically getting out of “always on” mode and b) getting better in managing time-zones, especially since we have engineering teams across the globe.
Have you picked up any fun hobbies during quarantine?
Well, I’ve started cooking more and actually did quite a lot of (what I call as non-golf) walks in my neighbourhood, Jersey City, which has been a very refreshing experience.
What’s one fun fact about you that your team may not know?
I’m a huge sports enthusiast — particularly racket sports! I’m looking forward to rekindling my love for Badminton in India.
