Chawla and Chandra will join in SVP roles overseeing lifecycle engineering and viewer experience, respectively.
Disney Streaming, which operates the Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+ services globally, has appointed two executives from Netflix and Meta to lead customer and viewer experiences in SVP positions.
Devika Chawla will join Disney Streaming next week as senior VP of lifecycle engineering. She previously worked at Netflix as director of engineering. She will lead customer retention across the company’s streaming brands, which include Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+.
In the role, she will head strategy and road map for all global customer communication, working closely with the group’s data team along with business and regional leadership in EMEA, LATAM and APAC regions.
She will be reporting directly to Sean Curtis, who is the senior VP of services and data engineering at Disney Streaming.
Arun Chandra comes to Disney after more than four years at Meta, where he served as the VP of scaled operations. As Disney streaming’s SVP viewer experience, Chandra will in part oversee the company’s teams overseeing viewer experience and audience data across the company’s streaming platforms. He will be reporting directly to Alisa Bowen, executive VP of business operations.
The two hires come about a month after Disney brought on Jeremy Doig, an 18-year veteran of Google, as chief technology officer.
In a statement, Chawla said: “I’m very excited about the huge potential and impact of elevating consumer lifecycle experiences across Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+ globally. The opportunity to build world-class teams, technologies and products for this scale that amplify the stories created at Disney is tremendous. I look forward to experiencing the magic and adventure at Disney.”
Chandra added: “I am proud to join Disney, a company that continuously innovates to delight customers in both the digital and physical worlds. It’s incredibly exciting to have this opportunity to scale up our best-in-class Viewer Experience team for Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and Star+ and deliver an exceptional experience for all our viewers across the globe.”
