THE AKASH
SAHA STORY

A computer science masters graduate joins a $30B quant hedge fund and quickly becomes one of the most trusted engineers in the company servicing the data needs of research and trading. Single-handedly builds the Bloomberg Equities Loader — one of the firm's most business-critical systems and starts leading data engineering teams with several promotions along the way to VP. Learns that good infrastructure is invisible; bad infrastructure is a 3am phone call.

Relocates to Winton's new US branch in San Francisco focussing on new business ventures, data science and big data and leads the Data Marketing function as SVP, producing world-class interactive data visualisations of novel datasets — showcased live on touchscreens across every Winton office globally. Builds The Music Fund MVP with data scientists and designers — an internal bet that gets big enough to spin off as its own company. Nobody expected the side project to become the plot.

As VP of Engineering, ships The Music Fund from zero to a market-ready platform backed by Techstars Music and Warner Music. Onboards 5,000+ artists leading the full stack product development of the TMF web app — a fully automated platform delivering instant royalty advances to artists in exchange for a percentage of their future streaming income — encompassing artist onboarding, royalty data extraction from music distributor portals, offer presentation, customer verification, and payment services. Learns fundraising is just another kind of live demo.

The Music Fund is acquired by HIFI, a financial rights organization for artists. As Principal Full-Stack Engineer, integrates TMF's technology into the HIFI platform and leads full stack product development of the royalty data pipeline — automating ingestion and normalization of royalty data from music distributor portals, and building the artist mobile app and enterprise web app that let artists and managers see every stream, every dollar, in one place. Co-develops Cash Flow, an artist micropayment product that becomes the cornerstone of HIFI's own acquisition. Twist ending.

HIFI is acquired by Block. Quickly becomes the de facto Engineering Lead for Tidal's Monetization — leading Spotlight, Contributions, a 10-country expansion, and Paygating Tracks, shipped from zero to MVP in under 4 weeks. Presents to Jack Dorsey and the company regularly. Coins "Jimmy C," an AI intern with better uptime than most humans.

  Behind the Scenes

Live at the London onsite: presenting the Spotlight & Contributions demo to Block CEO Jack Dorsey (standing extreme right) and the entire Tidal Org — the launch moment that made the cross-BU milestone between Cash App and Tidal real.

An Engineering Manager interviews with Netflix's Member Innovation team. Ideas ship faster. Context replaces control. The credits roll on Season 1 — and Season 2 starts filming.