Interim Chief Technology Officer — Streaming Reliability Recovery

The mandate

A premium live event suffered widespread playback failure when authentication retries, manifest demand and advertising calls amplified one another, and the CTO resigned following the incident review. Another rights season begins in five months, leaving little time to prove the full viewer path at realistic concurrency.

The interim must start within three weeks for a fixed nine-month term, covering remediation, event rehearsal, live season and post-event assurance. Permanent recruitment begins after the first full-scale test, with five weeks reserved for handover.

Handover is complete when two major events meet start-up, buffering, availability and ad-delivery thresholds, region and CDN failover are exercised, severe incident actions close, and the successor has directed one production-readiness review. Synthetic component tests alone cannot satisfy completion.

The interim may stop releases, redistribute the ₹16 crore reliability portfolio, alter CDN allocation and invoke supplier remedies. Rights commitments, additional cloud or CDN spend above ₹20 crore, permanent vice-president hires, customer credits above ₹5 crore and material ad-SLA changes require CEO or board approval.

Content acquisition, subscription pricing and editorial programming are outside scope. The technology seat ensures reliable delivery and measurement but will not own which events are bought or how advertisers are priced.

Why this seat is open

The outage exposed cross-platform failure that no component owner could see or stop. Existing engineering leaders are accountable for services under investigation and cannot independently arbitrate the recovery design. A temporary CTO can impose end-to-end production truth before the next rights season.

What you will own

• Reconstruct the viewer failure chain across identity, entitlement, manifests, CDN, client playback and advertising calls.
• Decide the reliability backlog by quantified viewer impact, correlated failure mode and time to safe mitigation.
• Set full-scale readiness tests for concurrency, device mix, network degradation, ad load and retry behaviour.
• Approve live-event release freezes, war-room authority and rollback triggers with explicit commercial escalation.
• Exercise region, CDN and advertising failover while reconciling audience, playback and monetisation records.
• Demonstrate two premium events within agreed viewer-experience and ad-delivery thresholds.
• Transfer architecture decisions, capacity contracts, incident actions, supplier exposures and the next season plan to the permanent CTO.

Candidate qualifications

• Held CTO, streaming platform chief or engineering director authority for large-scale live or on-demand video.
• Recovered a concurrency-driven outage involving clients, CDN, identity and advertising dependencies.
• Governed live-event readiness using realistic traffic and device distributions.
• Managed cloud and CDN capacity economics alongside viewer and advertising SLAs.
• Directed several hundred engineers through high-visibility production incidents.
• Can communicate probabilistic capacity and resilience decisions to media and board executives.

Non-negotiables

• Available in Bengaluru within three weeks and for all major live-event windows.
• No current incentive or advisory relationship with CDN, cloud or ad-delivery vendors.
• Will not approve readiness from scaled-down component tests.
• Must have carried final production authority for a major live stream.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm availability for the stated season and disclose any CDN or media conflict.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a live-stream failure you recovered and its non-obvious dependency.
3. 49 words maximum. Which rehearsal condition best predicts opening-minute playback failure?