THE AKASH
SAHA STORY

HIFI is acquired by Block. Quickly becomes the de facto Engineering Lead for Tidal's Monetization — leading the engineers, prioritizing the roadmap in the room with product and business, and presenting to the company regularly.

1. 1
   Paygating Tracks

   Engineering DRI for a cross-platform team across web, iOS, Android and backend. Shipped MVP in under four weeks, with a full Stripe checkout integration on all clients.
   Delivery of complex initiatives
2. 2
   Spotlight

   Pays artists when Tidal's editors playlist their uploads, with payouts through Cash App. Tidal's first Cash App integration, started as an MVP demoed at the London onsite.
   Artist-facing product thinking
3. 3
   Spotlight International Expansion

   Took Spotlight to 10 more countries, with Stripe payout infrastructure for artists outside the US.
   Partner teams and dependencies
4. 4
   Contributions

   Fans send money straight to an artist through a Cash App integration. Designed so Tidal never touches the money, which kept it simple enough to ship fast.
   Architecture and assumptions
5. 5
   Headliners

   A $1M contest paying out $100K each to 10 independent artists, shipped in under two weeks. Ran the web build and wrote part of it himself.
   Hands-on player-coach
6. 6
   The Team

   Personally onboarded every new engineer who joined, ran structured 1:1s, and gave coaching and career-development feedback.
   Developing engineers
7. 7
   Sprints and Retros

   Ran Monetization sprints and retrospectives recognized as the best-run in the org and adopted as a blueprint by other teams. Championed staged rollouts with feature flags and rollback plans.
   Delivery and prioritization
8. 8
   Jimmy C

   The “AI intern” persona he coined and demoed, which got the org talking about AI agents in day-to-day engineering. Better uptime than most humans.
   AI in engineering workflows

  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.

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 development of the royalty data pipeline. Twist ending in Episode 5.

1. 1
   Royalty Data Pipeline

   Led full-stack development of the pipeline that ingests and normalizes royalty statements, cutting a multi-hour manual process to about 10 minutes.
   Backend engineering
2. 2
   20 Normalizers

   Wrote 20 of the platform's 23 statement normalizers: distributors (DistroKid, CD Baby, TuneCore), labels (UMG, Sony Music), publishers (Kobalt, Warner Chappell) and collection societies (ASCAP, BMI, PRS).
   Hands-on player-coach
3. 3
   BigQuery to ClickHouse

   Remodeled the databases and sped up queries, ending dashboard timeouts and cutting load times from up to 30 seconds to a few seconds. Published as a case study on ClickHouse's engineering blog.
   Technical architecture
4. 4
   Artist App, Enterprise App

   Built front-end features across the artist mobile app and the enterprise web app, so artists and managers could see every stream and every dollar in one place.
   Full-stack engineering
5. 5
   Cash Flow

   Worked closely with design, business and product on an artist micropayment product that became the cornerstone of HIFI's own acquisition by Block.
   Product mindset

The side project becomes a company. As VP of Engineering, ships The Music Fund from zero to a market-ready platform backed by Techstars Music and Warner Music. Learns fundraising is just another kind of live demo.

1. 1
   Techstars Music, Class of 2019

   Led engineering and product development from the ground up, building and directing a small cross-functional team from MVP to a market-ready launch.
   Leading a team
2. 2
   Self-Serve Artist Financing

   Led full-stack development of a fully automated platform paying artists up front for a share of future streaming income: onboarding, royalty data extraction, offer presentation, customer verification and payments.
   Full-stack engineering
3. 3
   Distributor Automation

   Automated login and royalty statement retrieval for DistroKid, CD Baby and TuneCore, cutting a 2–5 minute manual step to under 10 seconds and driving a 10x+ increase in completed applications within weeks.
   Product mindset
4. 4
   Streaming Data Sources

   Brought in Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists data alongside distributor statements, through access artists granted to their own accounts.
   Backend engineering
5. 5
   5,000+ Artists

   Onboarded through continuous product improvement and automation.
   Building for artists

Relocates to Winton's new US branch in San Francisco — new business ventures, data science and big data — and leads the Data Marketing function. Nobody expected the side project to become the plot.

1. 1
   Building the SF Brand

   Stood up Winton's Data Marketing function from scratch in the newly opened San Francisco office, hiring and leading a small team. Credited by leadership with “building up the Winton SF brand.”
   Hiring and leading a team
2. 2
   Conferences and Partners

   Represented Winton at conferences and with partner companies, and organized Bay Area events — sourcing speakers, marketing material and custom visualizations.
   Building relationships
3. 3
   Touchscreens in Every Office

   Shipped interactive visualizations of financial markets, alternative data (global shipping, news sentiment) and corporate networks (board interlocks, M&A, suppliers). Shown live in every Winton office and presented at conferences including SXSW.
   Product and design collaboration
4. 4
   Full Stack, End to End

   Led full-stack development of the web applications and backend data services behind the visualizations, including sourcing and normalizing the data.
   Full-stack engineering
5. 5
   The Music Fund MVP

   Spearheaded product development with data scientists and designers — an internal bet that got big enough to spin off as a standalone fintech company.
   Product mindset

A computer science master's graduate joins a $30B quant hedge fund and becomes one of the most trusted engineers serving research and trading — promoted several times on the way to VP. Learns that good infrastructure is invisible; bad infrastructure is a 3am phone call.

1. 1
   Leading Data Engineering

   Led and grew a team of data engineers, owning hiring, performance reviews and career development, and running the on-call rotation for trading systems.
   Managing engineers
2. 2
   The Interview Loop

   Wrote the technical assessments used to evaluate candidates and ran interview loops — credited by leadership as “a key factor in the team's development.”
   Hiring and onboarding
3. 3
   Reference & Market Data

   Led the team behind the data infrastructure for Winton's expansion into long-only equities, including the Winton Global Equity Fund, which scaled to roughly $650–750M in AUM.
   Delivery of complex initiatives
4. 4
   One Service Layer

   Led the redesign of the core trading pipeline into an access-controlled service layer in front of ~35 legacy subsystems, and improved pipeline performance by 50% with a custom caching system.
   Technical architecture
5. 5
   Bloomberg Equities Loader

   Rewrote one of the firm's most business-critical systems, making it 3x faster (30 minutes to 9) with no production incidents after launch. Shipped with 218 unit tests and a seven-week parallel run; the project-planning method became the engineering org's standard.
   Backend engineering