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.