What we talked about
Shailin Saraiya, Sr. Engineering Manager at Roku, joins us to explore what it really takes to lead globally distributed engineering teams at scale. With over a decade of experience at Roku, Sony, and more, Shailin shares how he manages time zone complexity, builds a unified culture, and ensures product quality with AI-driven systems.
Show notes
Shailin Saraiya manages a team of roughly 20 engineers across the US, India, and Ukraine:a 12-hour time zone gap on one side, a war zone on the other:and the most important thing he has changed about his leadership since taking on that scope is how much context he now wraps around every instruction he gives.
What we covered
- The time zone spread between US and India is roughly 12 hours, which means any fixed meeting time permanently punishes one region. Saraiya’s solution is to rotate meeting times across quarters so that the inconvenience is shared, not stacked on one team. He notes that expecting engineers in India to attend 8-9pm meetings indefinitely is not sustainable and drives attrition:and that retaining someone after five to six months of ramp-up time is its own economic argument.
- Hiring for distributed teams requires assessing skills that aren’t tested in standard interviews: problem ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to communicate effectively without being in the same room. Saraiya’s team includes local members in interview panels specifically to reduce geographic bias and to check whether the existing team would actually enjoy working with a candidate.
- Saraiya is explicit that cultural differences in communication style are a real operational factor. He gives the example that direct feedback, which works fine in the US, can land badly in India. His response is to build safe spaces where people can be honest rather than trying to impose a single communication style:including anonymous feedback mechanisms that get reviewed collectively before being shared with managers.
- The Media QC platform project is his example of cross-regional distributed ownership at scale: the US team built machine learning models for lip sync detection and audio classification; the India team built data pipelines and inference orchestration; the Ukraine team built the UI and integrated results into operator workflows. The unified system significantly reduced manual quality control and caught errors that previously slipped through:despite the teams never sharing a working day.
- Saraiya describes his leadership shift as moving from hands-on to coach. With 20 engineers across three regions, micromanagement is physically impossible. His focus is on clarity of vision, removing blockers, and building local leaders who can make decisions without escalating to him:both because it’s necessary and because it develops people’s careers.
- Roku uses AI across its content pipeline to address a structural problem: studios deliver content with video defects, audio issues, and out-of-sync closed captions, and the volume makes manual review impossible. ML models now detect lip sync errors, missing dialogue, and video artifacts automatically. Separately, computer vision and NLP extract faces, genres, and plot summaries to enrich metadata that drives personalization and content discoverability.
About Shailin Saraiya
Shailin Saraiya is a Senior Engineering Manager at Roku, where he leads globally distributed teams building content management and media automation systems. He has over a decade of Engineering leadership experience across companies including Roku and Sony.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shailinsaraiya
- Website: https://www.roku.com
Episode 31 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.58) Welcome back to the Prevetted podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Our guest today is Shailin Saraya. He’s a senior engineer manager at Roku where he leads high performing globally distributed teams building scalable systems that power millions of streaming experiences. He has over a decade of experience across tech giants like Roku, Sony and many others.
He has driven large-scale content management systems, led major launches like the Roku channel in Mexico, or Mexico, and pioneered cost-saving initiatives using AI and machine learning. Today, we’re going to deep-dive into how Shailin thinks about building effective globally distributed teams. Hello, Shailin, how are we doing today?
Shailin (00:57.927) Hey Federico, I’m doing good. How are you doing?
Federico Ramallo (01:01.656) I am doing great. As we were talking before, I’m just coming back from San Francisco, so catching up with the new rhythm of coming back to my office. Yes, yes. So let’s talk a little bit about the globally distributed engineering teams. What are some unique challenges that you face managing this type of teams?
Shailin (01:14.713) Alright.
Shailin (01:31.495) think that’s a great question, Federico. So I think one of the biggest challenges that we face is the time zone overlap, right? So I do have teams in the US, India and Ukraine. And as you can see, there is a narrow window for real time collaboration, right? So we are aware to adopt a culture of asynchronous communication. So we rely heavily on documentation and clear handoffs.
One of the other challenges that we face is building a unified team culture. When people are in the same room, it’s easy to build that culture. When people are, you know, if teams are distributed across the globe, then you cannot rely on hallway conversations. You cannot have shared lunch to build that connection. Right. So we have had to be very intentional with our team rituals. So we have like
global demos, have regular recognitions, we also have one-on-one conversations to create that sense of belonging. The other challenge that we face is cultural differences in communication style and that specifically sort of also come into the play. Some teams are more direct, whereas other teams are more reserved. So it’s important to create a safe space where everyone feels heard.
regardless of pathset.
Federico Ramallo (03:01.985) Yes, yes, agree on intentionally building the culture. When you’re managing these teams, you have the unique opportunity. Well, I believe that you have this unique opportunity to shape how these communications are going to be because of the nature of the remote team, they are isolated, right? So you can…
design how that communication is going to be, right? Up to a certain level, I think that’s a unique opportunity. But as you said, it has to be intentional, right? Yeah, and there is a big difference when you see a email address or a photo profile, whatever. The level of communication that you can have, it’s a…
less effective compared to someone that you know personally and you have a personal relationship, right? Or you had lunch with, right?
Shailin (04:10.961) Right. No, I think that building that personal relationship is a key, right? When you are sitting with someone in the same office, as I said, you can have in-person meetings, can have lunches, you can have sort of hallway conversations, right? Those things really help. But when your teams are not at the same place, not in the same region, then it makes it a little difficult to have.
those kind of things. it becomes really important that you have, like as I said, like you have global demos. You also have one-on-one conversations. You also sort of do regular recognition as well, where everyone feels that they are part of the team. And in a way, sort of try to create a sense of belonging.
Federico Ramallo (05:07.073) Yes, yes. And you touch something interesting about direct feedback, right? It’s direct communication. It’s a sign of disrespect. Right? And that’s a cultural shift that, you know, in the American culture, they’re more used to, you know, direct communication, right? And here with Team2Urcultures, you have to, you know…
build more steps into that.
Shailin (05:38.919) Right, right, exactly, exactly. As you said, like in the states, we tend to be more direct. But if you go, let’s say, this is just an example, but let’s say if you go in India, that communication style may not work. Right. You may have to find other ways to communicate with people. And the thing is, you have to create a safe space, which is very important so that everyone feels that they are heard, regardless of
where they are sitting
Federico Ramallo (06:13.853) It’s, I have a similar situation. So I build teams in Mexico for companies in the US. one of the challenges we have there is that some engineers are used to say yes to everything, right? Even though they might not be, they could not be able to do it, right? So in Mexico, I know Latin America, right? If somebody invites you to a party,
Shailin (06:33.467) Mm.
Federico Ramallo (06:42.402) You say yes, it’s rude to say no, right? Even though you know you couldn’t go, right? Or you don’t want to, right? But it’s courtesy to say yes, right? So the same thing applies when a manager in the US asked to one of the engineers in Mexico, can you build this by Friday or whatever? And they say yes, right? So I teach them about that they’re dealing their own
Shailin (06:43.697) Right. Right. Right.
Federico Ramallo (07:12.13) great basically, right? Because they’re over committing, right? Yeah. And I think they are doing it from a point of view of love, right? It’s like, want to please, I want to, you know, I want to do it, I want to try to do it, right? But the manager on the other side is expecting if you’re saying yes, it’s because you’re committing to do it, right? And you know, 100 % you’re going to deliver.
Shailin (07:15.001) Right, right,
Shailin (07:31.952) Right.
Shailin (07:40.731) Right, right, right. I think that is where it is important that like manager as a manager you talk to your team, right? That even if you say no, it is okay to say no, right? If you cannot commit to something or if you cannot deliver something, it is okay to say no. Don’t work on it because essentially it is going to hurt you, right? It is going to hurt you. It is also going to hurt your team as well.
So that is the reason like you have to create that safe space where people can be honest with you.
Federico Ramallo (08:21.368) Right. On some of the teams, we do is to create this indirect feedback. We gather the feedback anonymously and then we discuss it internally with the team. And then we tell the team that we’re going to share that with the manager, but anonymized. But we have opportunity to review together to make sure that everybody agrees. And we have…
Shailin (08:40.679) Hmm.
Federico Ramallo (08:50.124) we make sure that we can review it internally before asking because if it’s something that it’s an impossible, it doesn’t make sense to us because it’s going to add more friction, right? So, but because the manager wants to know what is the feedback and the developers are afraid to speak up, right? So that work wonders because then the managers gets
Shailin (09:03.717) Right.
Shailin (09:15.771) Right.
Federico Ramallo (09:19.746) gets the feedback and then we work towards speaking out to say, I said this, right? Or the managers come and say, well, this feedback is a good idea. Who wants to do the change or improvement or whatever, right? Who wants to own it? And then we build these steps to give them, as you said, this safe space, right?
Shailin (09:37.831) night.
Shailin (09:45.743) I think that’s a great idea. That’s a great idea. Something that I should also implement probably.
Federico Ramallo (09:53.807) I’m glad to hear that, yeah, that you like it, yeah. So how do you screen and hire engineers from different regions to ensure consistent quality and culture fit?
Shailin (10:10.855) think what we have is we basically have a standardized interview process. So in a way, have sort of standardized our interview process globally. What it means is we have consistent structure with coding, we have system design rounds, we have also behavioral rounds as well. So having standardized interview process really helps regardless of geography.
But having said that, we do tailor questions to assess skills that are critical in a remote setup because teams are globally distributed, right? So everyone is sort of in a way working remotely or they are communicating with each other remotely, right? So we do have questions to assess certain skills like if a candidate can own the problem or not, like problem ownership.
how candidate communicates when he or she is working remotely. We also assess the autonomy of the candidate as well. So some of this key areas we try to assess a candidate. In addition to that, cultural fit doesn’t mean everyone looks the same or thinks the same, right? It means alignment with our core values.
So we do have some core values within our team as well as with Roku as well. So we do focus on ownership. We do focus on collaboration. We also see whether a candidate how curious the candidate is. right. And as part of our interview process, we also involve a local team members in the interview panels so that they can also provide the perspective on
team dynamics and reduce bias. If there is any bias then that can be reduced with local team members.
Federico Ramallo (12:18.37) Right, right. And also if the other current team members could feel comfortable working with this new hire, right? Which is, yes, yes. Yeah, one thing I was coming to the conclusion is that the noise signal ratio outside of the US, there’s more
Shailin (12:27.141) which is very important, which is very important.
Federico Ramallo (12:48.268) more noise versus signal because we had to go through more candidates to find good candidates in Latin America. And I believe that happens in other countries as well. And I think that the reason for that is that the quality of training can vary a lot. And then you have all these other cultural issues that we talk about.
that also affect, you know, can have somebody that is technically good, but if they don’t know how to operate remotely and self-manage, then it’s going to be an issue, right?
Shailin (13:17.169) late.
Shailin (13:29.009) Right, no, that is very important. I think as you said, right, you correctly mentioned that at least in my team, I’m looking for engineers who not only bring strong technical skills, but to thrive in distributed teams. So people who are proactive, people who are empathetic and comfortable navigating ambiguity because in software engineering world, there is a lot of ambiguity when you are solving the problem, right?
may not get all the answers right away. You may have to navigate through ambiguity. You may have to work with other engineers. You may also have to work with product managers. You may have to work with your stakeholders. You may have to also work cross-functionally as well, right, to get to the right answer. The answer may not be given to you right away. So some of the skills are very important when we assess the candidate during the interview process.
Federico Ramallo (14:27.555) Yes, yes, I agree. I mean, I can tell you a bit on what I do on that side. I lean a lot on the social skills, right? Because the technical skills are a little bit easier to validate or to test, easier to learn, right? You can learn, you know, framework or a new tool, you know.
that’s faster to learn than the social skills, right? So we figured out is that, if we find somebody that has the social skills they’re looking for and the experience working with American teams, see if they have, then we start checking those boxes. And then another thing that we do a lot is back channel, back channel verifications, so that way we can validate
the reputation of that person throughout the work. So that becomes very important for us because it allows us to know, usually, at least in Mexico, we know a guy that knows a guy. So the community is very small, so we can find, share relationships that help us get a better picture of that person. We don’t use that as the final decision, but it
it allows us to validate, right? Because I’ve seen a lot of professional interviewers, I call them, that are really good on paper, but when they start working with you, they’re not good candidates, right?
Shailin (15:59.495) Good day.
Shailin (16:14.225) right right I think having a reference always helps right if someone can vouch for the candidate that really helps and at very early stage of my career my mentor actually gave me this advice that it is easy to deal with the court but it is difficult to deal with people so people who can deal with the other people easily meaning like who have good social skills who can talk nicely right
I think those are very important skills and those are sometimes harder skills to learn than writing code or solving a problem.
Federico Ramallo (16:54.509) Right, right. Because you can write code, then if you’re writing the wrong functionality, then because you didn’t have a good communication with the product owner or didn’t validate your assumption as a developer, then yeah, you can be super fast, but you’re going in the wrong direction, right? Yeah. And as a manager, you see that and you say, well,
Shailin (17:15.845) Right, absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (17:22.607) We have to go that way and you’re running that way. Yes. And more frustrating when you learn that the next day or a few days later, right?
Shailin (17:25.413) Yeah, that is so true. That is so true.
Federico Ramallo (17:37.647) So what systems have you implemented to make collaboration seamless across time zones?
Shailin (17:47.025) Right. Yeah, it’s a very good question. I think as I said earlier, right? I mean, this like I do have teams in India. I do have teams in the US and Ukraine. So it is sort of geographically distributed teams. So we one of the things that we have done here is we have invested heavily in a think first workflows. What it means is
For us, documentation is key. So every design, every decision or update gets locked in Confluence or like nowadays Slack gets used a lot, right? So we also sort of try to share this documentation via Slack for better visibility. One of the other things that we do here is we try to have standups or daily standups.
And those Delhi standups are held as per region. So every region will have its own standup. We will not force each team or a team who is located somewhere else, we will not force them to join some other region stand up, right? Because it won’t be good. And like we also use JIRA a lot. So we sort of share our tasks through JIRA boards.
Federico Ramallo (18:53.993) nice.
Shailin (19:14.247) and we record our updates in Jira. We also have global demos as well where everyone would come to the demo, they would join the demo meetings and then they would present what they have worked on which sort of also helps cross pollinate ideas and celebrate wins because demos I do feel that demos is a great way to celebrate wins where everyone can sort of showcase what they have been working on, what they have achieved and in a way collectively you celebrate wins.
Right. Apart from that, I think we also use a lot of tools as well. So we do use Slack. We do use Miro. We do use Datadog to keep communication fluid and observability high. And then one of the things that I try to do is for live meetings, I’m very careful about scheduling. So we do record sessions. We also rotate meeting times to be fair across time zones.
So, to make sure that every time not only one region team located in one region has to suffer. So, we also try to rotate meeting times as well just to be fair.
Federico Ramallo (20:26.935) Interesting. I think it’s the first time that I hear about that time rotation of meetings. I think it’s an interesting concept. Yeah.
Yeah, we.
Shailin (20:38.983) Yeah, the thing is people. So I remember probably 10-15 years ago, it was probably OK. Let’s say if you go. If you have a team in India and if you ask folks in India to join meetings at the night, right? Probably at 8 p.m., 9 p.m. But things have changed now. like teams do like to.
sort of people do like to spend time with their family. So they also try to have work life balance as well. So after 6 p.m. they do like to go home. They do like to spend time with their family, which is fair, right? So that is the reason when you have a big time zone difference between let’s say a team in the US and team in India, which is like 12 hour time zone difference, right? So if we schedule the time, if you schedule a meeting at the same time,
every time then one of the teams will suffer. So we try to sort of rotate meeting times just to be fair across time zones.
Federico Ramallo (21:50.705) Yes, yes, I understand the burn off of the stress, not necessarily the exhaustment that generates like having to work night and overnight and overnight, it wears the people, right? It, yeah.
Shailin (22:06.895) Exactly. It’s not sustainable, right? mean, like folks may attend meetings for a few weeks, few months, but then after that, they would just not attend or they would attend, then they would not, their heart and their mind will be some somewhere else. And then, you know, after some time, they will, as you said, they’ll get exhausted and they may also look for some other opportunities, right? So retention is also a key for us.
that if you have hired someone, then we want to keep that person because we have invested in that person, right? First five to six months, most likely the person, the candidate or the person that we have hired won’t be productive as much as we want, right? So first five, six months would basically go in ramp up time. But then after that, we do want to retain people for a long period.
Federico Ramallo (23:00.292) We had a situation where the manager was staying late night for the release. So I proposed that our team in Mexico, with the manager on the Pacific, our team in Central, for us it was easy to accommodate to Pacific, right? Because it’s just two hours. So we proposed, well, we can have
some team members on the QA team and we rotated that. They could work more on central time and then they could, instead of 11 p.m. for the manager in the West Coast, then it was like 8 p.m. for us. So it was much easier time to work, right? And then we found a way to compensate that. If they stay a little bit longer, then they could take a little bit more time.
more time off or, you know, we find a way to incentivize that and reward that voluntary, you know, calling, right? And it wasn’t all days, but we, I proposed that because I was noticing the manager, you know, adding more stress and more stress with that, you know, with that and other situations, right? So, you know, when we proposed that,
It was like, this is a great idea. we supported that. And then we did the handoff of the release to the team in India. So they would do the regression tests overnight. And then we would do a lot of the automated tests and a lot of the most critical tests that would say go, no go for the release. And then they would, you know.
Shailin (24:37.319) Hmm.
Federico Ramallo (24:54.244) So that way we could save them time if it was a no-go for the release. But at least then they could go and do all the regression tests already had documented. And then they had the green light from this team to move forward. And it worked great and it was a great improvement.
Shailin (25:18.855) Yeah, I think it totally makes sense. totally makes sense and appreciating your employees is a very critical thing, very important thing. In a way, are sort of when you reward a person, when you reward your employee, you are appreciating your is or her work, right? And it’s a great way to motivate the employees as well, the team members in a way.
Federico Ramallo (25:46.961) Right, Yeah, the thing we work on our side is the flexibility and time of working hours. I set up that as a privilege that they earn by doing their job and achieving their goals, right? And having a clear communication on when they’re working, when they’re not, if they had to leave, I don’t know, for a bank or…
Shailin (26:03.079) Mm.
Federico Ramallo (26:16.656) you know, they have to go and pick up their kids or whatever, that they could be clear about that. So that way, if a manager or somebody else on the team needs to reach out, they know, oh, it’s not available now, but that person is going to be available in 30 minutes, And, you know, be there in under 30 minutes or whatever time it is, right? That way we build that trust and then the flexible hours become, you know,
It’s a privilege, but it’s an earned privilege, right? And people work hard to get that, to keep that privilege, right?
Shailin (26:57.157) Right. I think that totally makes sense.
Federico Ramallo (27:04.122) Great, so how has leading a global team influenced your leadership style and communication approach?
Shailin (27:20.743) think that’s a good question. So I think so far
Shailin (27:31.713) I would say it has actually made me much more intentional communicator. So for example, when I’m in a meeting, I can’t assume that people will get it just because I said once in a meeting, right? Especially if the person is not even in the meeting due to time zone. So I’ll try to explain what I’m trying to say. So
I think the thing is what I’ve learned is I’ve I’ve learned to write more clearly, follow up more often and communicate context, not just instructions. Right. So a lot of time what happens is like to your team, you just give the instructions that is or it is sort of you just give the order which basically is not the right way to do things.
you should basically try to communicate at least I try to communicate more context rather than just giving them instructions. And then one of the things that as I said, I’ve learned is write more clearly and like I try to be as I said, much more intentional communicator.
Federico Ramallo (28:57.762) Interesting. Yeah, the…
The lack of context is like a punchline without, you you don’t hear the joke, you just hear the punchline, right?
Shailin (29:10.021) Yeah, that is so true. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (29:12.048) So you miss the joke, right? What is the joke, right? And it happens to me as well that I will give instructions and forget about giving the context because it’s in our head and we feel like, well, everybody knows, right? It’s obvious, right? Yeah. And we don’t know what the other person doesn’t know, right?
Shailin (29:33.927) Thank you.
Federico Ramallo (29:41.36) We kind of, you eventually you can figure out what they do and don’t, but, you know, if we don’t have that conscious thought, then we miss sharing context that is important, right?
Shailin (29:54.843) very important. I remember when I was working as an engineer, I hated when my manager would just give me instructions and not provide enough context because then the thing is it sort of kills my creativity right. If you just give me the context and then just leave it to me how I solve the problem right. If you just give me
instructions and just follow the order then that is not engineering right you are just asking me to do abc things and it could be possible that in my mind i don’t see that i don’t want to do abc i want to do probably xyz right so i always like to when i was an engineer i always liked my manager to give me context and then just give me a problem statement and just leave it to me and then i would solve it so that is
what I also now have started doing with my teams as well, where I focus more on the context rather than instructions. The other thing is I’ve also basically shifted from being hands-on to being a coach, right? So with a global team, I can’t micromanage nor should I. Instead, I focus on clarity of vision.
removing blockers if let’s say if any team member has any blockers and I basically focus on removing their blockers and sort of in a way enabling people to lead locally.
Federico Ramallo (31:30.299) So you build local leaders that can help you support the team.
Shailin (31:33.625) Exactly right right because right now my current team size is around 20 so a lot of team members right so I do try to build local leaders who can sort of help me it also helps their career as well and in a way it also helps me as well right as I said like I with with this kind of team I cannot micromanage and nor should I
Federico Ramallo (32:02.853) Yes, because there’s also World 24-7, so you know, sometimes you have to also sleep, so it’s not physically possible. Well, it could, but you know, but it’s in depriments of your life entirely, right? So it doesn’t work long time.
Shailin (32:17.831) Exactly. And you have to build the culture of trust, right? And you have to delegate your tasks. cannot be everywhere and you cannot do everything. So you have to build local leaders whom you can trust, whom you can delegate some of your work.
Federico Ramallo (32:48.529) Sorry, it went off for a minute, so I apologize. Interesting that you talk about coaching, because I think that’s an interesting approach, because you teach them how to manage the team, how to manage themselves, so they can have more freedom. You’re not micromanaging them, and also they can be more effective.
Shailin (32:52.304) No worries, no worries.
Federico Ramallo (33:18.543) as team members.
Shailin (33:20.572) night.
Federico Ramallo (33:25.413) Great. Can you show an example of how your global team deliver a high impact project?
Shailin (33:33.041) Yeah, absolutely. So one of the examples that I can share is we have been working on this project called Media QC platform. So we needed to basically automate quality control checks for video, audio and captions across thousands and thousands of titles. So Roku being a streaming company, we do deal with the movies and TV shows. do deal with videos. Right. And
A lot of times when we receive these videos from different studios, different providers, they could have issues with the video quality, they could have issues with audio or closed caption quality. So what we did is we sort of distributed the work. So for example, a in the US focused on building the
ML models. basically focused on, for example, they focused on building lip sync detection and audio classification. Team in India focused on building the data pipelines and inference orchestration. Meanwhile, team in Ukraine focused on building the UI and integrated the results into the operator workflow. So
Despite time zones, we delivered a unified system that significantly reduced manual QC and caught errors that previously slipped through. So I would say that was a great example of distributed ownership and cross-regional collaboration at scale.
Federico Ramallo (35:19.067) yes because the level of coordination for that is very hard
Shailin (35:24.743) It’s very hard. It’s very hard. It’s very hard because as we discussed earlier, right? I mean, there is a time zone difference. There is also cultural difference. The way teams communicate with each other. So all this all these things actually make the entire project made entire project very challenging where people had to communicate with each other.
People also had to share their ideas had to come on the same page as far as the entire design architecture is concerned, right? Because various people, various teams would have different different ideas how they want to build a system, how they want to see the system. So it was definitely challenging. I would say it wasn’t easy. It was definitely challenging.
Federico Ramallo (36:23.483) Yes, yes, because the mating of the parts, you know, that’s where things can go wrong. having people on different time zones and different cultures that adds to, you know, the increase the possibility of miscommunication that could basically make pieces not working together, right?
Shailin (36:43.375) Exactly, Yeah. So yeah, I think we had to focus on as I said, like we have to focus on our objective. We had to align on what we are trying to build and sort of at times you would have conflicts at times there would be difference of opinions. But then we have to basically whenever there is a
conflict of opinions you we have to get everyone together we have to sort of do pros and cons of each approaches right because in software we say that no solution is right or wrong every solution has pros and cons right so you basically do pros and cons of each and every solution and then go from there
Federico Ramallo (37:41.459) Yes, when you were talking about before about giving context, I was thinking about that, there are some constraints that could be from business, budget, could be from the technical point of view or legal, that the engineer could have great ideas how to implement it differently, but if they don’t know those specific constraints, then it’s not going to work.
right? So having that context, understanding those constraints, because at the end of the day there is no perfect solution. It’s a balance.
Shailin (38:21.349) It’s balanced exactly. is balanced. is balanced. And yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, you have to build a system within constraints, right? The constraints that are being imposed by the business, by your stakeholders. Cost is also one of the other things that you have to be mindful about specifically when you are building this huge ML AI models. Cost could go just like impact.
Federico Ramallo (38:23.143) Yes.
Shailin (38:49.479) your overall project, right? It might be a great idea, but then it may not be feasible. Right. So you have to be build your system within the constraints that you have. And that is where the context becomes very important.
Federico Ramallo (39:05.99) Yes, yes, and the context and then the ability to work on those pros and cons. Yeah. And it’s very tempting to try to do a top-down solution. It’s like, okay, I am going to tell you how to build it, which goes back to instructions, right? Which could work, you know, can boost productivity on the first days or maybe a week, but…
in the long run is not a good strategy because then I built it like that because I was told, right? So now you don’t have engineers that are thinking, you have engineers that are following instructions from the top.
Shailin (39:42.097) Great.
Shailin (39:50.929) Right, absolutely. I think your ideas need to come from bottom to top, not top to bottom. I strongly feel that if you give enough freedom, flexibility and space to engineers, to your team members, they will come up with very good ideas, which you may not even thought about.
Federico Ramallo (40:12.55) Right. Right.
So how do you ensure alignment and motivation when your team is spread across continents?
Shailin (40:25.063) That’s a good question. So what we do is we use OKRs to keep everyone aligned on outcomes. So at the start of every quarter, we co-create objectives slash roadmap across regions, right? So that everyone feels invested. I would say motivation is more nuanced. I try to make time for regular one-on-ones, not just to check the
not just to check their progress, also like on their well-being. Even as I said earlier, that recognition also goes a long way. So we do public shout outs during demos. We also have retrospective meetings to celebrate wins no matter how small it is. And I would say most important thing is I encourage ownership. So
when engineers in different regions lead projects or drive initiatives. They’re not just aligned, they’re empowered as well.
Federico Ramallo (41:32.283) Interesting, yes. One thing that I was thinking, what is the ultimate goal of an engineer, right? I’m sorry, this is a little bit more philosophical, but as an engineer, we want to build stuff, right? That’s kind of the first degree of motivation, right? But then what’s the point of building something if nobody’s going to use it, right? So then…
The second one is impact in the world, right? If people are using what you build then that gives you bragging rights, you know, which is a great motivation, right?
Shailin (42:10.471) Right, right, right, exactly. So I think that is one of the reasons why like when we when we sort of come up with our quarterly road map. So every quarter we do come up with a road map. like what every team is going to work on, what every person is going to work on. Right. So that is where it goes back to what earlier what we were discussing about the context where we
provide the context to each and every team to each and every individual. We take their input. We also sort of make sure that whatever they are working on is actually a real world problem. It is going to create an impact. We are not asking them to solve the problem for just sake of solving it. If you give them enough of in context about how it is going to help either end users or how it is going to
save some cost for the company or how it would basically streamline the processes or how it will help our operations team. So we do work with our operations team very closely like my team works with operations team very closely. So one of the sort of KPIs that we track is how can we make their lives easier? Right. So let’s say if something is taking 30 30 minutes today to process, how can we make it faster? How can we reduce that?
turn around time from 30 minutes to let’s say five minutes, right? So if we can reduce it to five minutes, then it’s a big win, right? So we try to sort of communicate that impact. And as you said, like I’ve seen every engineer wants to work on a problem which creates the impact. And then they can also sort of claim that the problem that they solved, the problem that they worked on actually created the, it actually solved the problem for someone.
Federico Ramallo (44:08.4) Right, right. I was thinking about this when you were talking about these demo days, Global demo days because that’s when you can, you know, I’ve been working on this for weeks or months or whatever, and here it is, and now everybody’s using it, and it’s generating this impact and it’s hitting this OKR, right? So yeah, I can see how that could boost the motivation of the whole team.
Shailin (44:37.947) Right, right, right. And what I’ve seen is obviously everyone wants to earn good money. But at the same time, sometimes for lot of engineers, the work is more important than the money or the impact that they would create with their work is more important than just the money or just the compensation. That’s what I’ve observed.
Federico Ramallo (44:38.074) and the person that built it.
Federico Ramallo (45:07.162) Interesting. what I’ll add, sorry, has managing a global team opened up new opportunities or shifted your career trajectory?
Shailin (45:23.429) Shailin (45:28.039) That’s a good question. I mean, absolutely. Right. I mean, it has actually expanded my leadership lens beyond engineering. I now think about team scalability, cross-cultural dynamics and operational strategy. I would say it has also opened doors to work on high impact cross-functional initiatives. Things that just go beyond shipping features like
redefining our content ingestion workflows, right? I that is what my team does or scaling media automation with AI. So, as I said, like it has actually opened the doors to work on some of the high impact projects. And on a personal note, I would say it has made me a better listener, a better planner and someone who deeply values diversity, not just as a checkbox, but as a real strategic advantage.
Federico Ramallo (46:26.215) Yes, Diversity not as a signal virtue, but as a real diversity.
Shailin (46:33.679) DL diversity. Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (46:35.485) Yes.
I have a similar feeling when I build the teams in Mexico and I coach them and train them to be successful and I see how they thrive and they are able to take more responsibility. I feel very proud of what they can do, right? Because I am part of their journey, right?
I can help not only the client, not only there’s money involved, helping people getting a better life or getting a better work situation. I am very proud of being able to provide them with those situations.
Shailin (47:36.487) You are actually impacting people’s lives here, right? mean, as I said earlier, like it’s just about the engineering. It goes beyond engineering. Once you start managing global teams, it goes beyond just doing the normal engineering stuff.
Federico Ramallo (47:58.066) Yes, yes, I had one student that had a bad situation at home and I suggested that he should leave his house, so I helped him through that process. Not only financially, but also emotionally, Because it’s hard, And…
now he has a family, he’s working on big corporations, and he’s very smart, he’s a great engineer, so I’m very proud of all his achievements, right, and being part of his journey.
Shailin (48:47.653) Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I also have a very similar situation where one of my teammates, I think he wanted to work remotely. He wanted to relocate. Now, think specifically Roku is a very strong in-office culture. Roku has very strong in-office culture where it…
company encourages everyone to come to the office instead of working remotely. So, but then he had to relocate because he had some family issues. His parents were not doing well, so he wanted to relocate. So, I mean, I was glad that I could help him out. Right. I had to make a case for him. I had to fight hard for him. But when I like when he relocated and when I see him,
like helping his parents at the same time he is very productive as well. Right. So it feels good. It feels good. I would say.
Federico Ramallo (49:55.412) Yes, yes, I agree. I think that’s, you know, we were talking about going from individual contributor to manager and then managing a global team. I mean, it it comes with additional challenges, but I think that the reward personally, it’s amazing.
Shailin (50:20.231) Totally agree.
Federico Ramallo (50:23.027) So what advice would you give to leaders who are considering scaling other teams internationally?
Shailin (50:34.631) I would say be intentional, right? So scaling globally isn’t just about hiring more people. It’s about how those people collaborate, feel included and share ownership. Right? And I would also say that invest in onboarding and documentation early. Treat every region as a first-class citizen. Right? And…
The other advice that I would give is avoid creating silos. So mix teams across regions rather than keeping them isolated. And finally, communicate more than you think you need to. Clarity and context go a long way in distributed teams.
Federico Ramallo (51:26.813) Amazing, amazing advice, yes. So one last question before we wrap it up because I you have another meeting so I want to take more of your time. How are you currently using AI and machine learning to improve content management and user experience at Roku?
Shailin (51:49.447) Yeah, that’s a great question. So we are actually using AI across multiple layers of our content pipeline. So one example which I shared with you is to sort of automate the content quality process where we have built ML models that detect lip sync issues, can detect missing dialogues, or it can also detect video artifacts.
right that basically helps us automate manual quality control for faster turnaround and better accuracy. So that’s one use case. The other use case we are also sort of where we are using ML AI is we are also using computer vision and NLP to enrich metadata. So for example, extracting faces, genres, plot summarization.
from the content which sort of fuels personalization and improves content discoverability.
Federico Ramallo (52:51.071) interesting. Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask about that because basically you can, because you have different sources of data, right? And then you have your own data, right? So, and the data from other sources, you don’t control the quality. So you need to do your own QC and then match that with your, you know, data so you can search for an actor and you know, you can find it everywhere, right? Even if it’s, there’s a typo or whatever.
Shailin (53:00.327) That is correct.
Federico Ramallo (53:20.444) one of the sources.
Shailin (53:21.851) Right, right, exactly right. mean, essentially or eventually when a user watches a content on Roku and something goes wrong, then end user doesn’t know that Roku is not the actual owner of the video. User is going to blame Roku if something goes wrong with their viewing experience. So we need to make sure that all the
Contents that we are ingesting into our system. We do a thorough quality control and Historically a of this lot of this quality control have been done manually Which cannot scale right? I mean you are ingesting thousands and thousands of content every day. You cannot have human sitting Watching to our long movie to find issues right you need to build sophisticated software solutions
to detect those issues. And as you said, like there are multiple, there are various attributes here. You could have video issues, could have closed caption issues, you could have audio issues, right? You could have art image issues, artwork issues, right? One of the examples is let’s say if you are, and you must have seen this as well. When you are watching a video, you see closed captions and sometimes closed captions may not be in sync with audio.
So either closed caption is going fast or it is behind, right? And as a user, you get irritated. Oh, what is this? Right? Why are these closed captions are not in sync? Right? So it’s not only detecting the issue, it’s also sometimes correcting issues as well automatically.
Federico Ramallo (55:07.816) Yes, or they get stretched, know, the SRT is longer and then it gets shifted towards time, right? And it becomes so annoying, yeah.
Shailin (55:15.109) Exactly,
Federico Ramallo (55:20.148) Amazing, amazing. Thank you very much Shailene for joining us. I appreciate you being here and I value very much your advice for managing global teams.
Shailin (55:37.575) Thank you, Federico, and thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for having me on your podcast. Thank you very much.
Federico Ramallo (55:44.116) Thank you.