Akash Saha

HIFI is acquired by Block. I take on engineering management for Tidal's Monetization work — leading the engineers, setting the roadmap in the room with product and business, and presenting to Jack Dorsey and the company regularly.

1. 1
   Paygating Tracks

   Engineering DRI for a cross-platform tiger team across web, iOS, Android and backend. Zero to shipped MVP in under four weeks, with a full Stripe checkout integration.
   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 for independent artists, shipped in under two weeks. I ran the web build and wrote part of it myself.
   Hands-on player-coach
6. 6
   The Team

   Personally onboards every new engineer who joins, runs structured 1:1s, and gives coaching and career-development feedback.
   Developing engineers
7. 7
   Jimmy C

   The "AI intern" persona I coined and demoed, which got the org talking about AI agents in day-to-day engineering.
   AI in engineering workflows

The Music Fund is acquired by HIFI, a financial rights organization for artists. I lead full-stack product development so artists and managers can see every stream and every dollar in one place.

1. 1
   Royalty Data Pipeline

   Automated ingestion and normalization of royalty data from music distributor portals.
   Backend engineering
2. 2
   Artist App, Enterprise App

   Built the artist mobile app and the enterprise web app for artists and their managers.
   Full-stack engineering
3. 3
   Cash Flow

   Co-developed an artist micropayment product that became the cornerstone of HIFI's own acquisition by Block.
   Product mindset
4. 4
   One Platform

   Integrated The Music Fund's technology into the HIFI platform after the acquisition.
   Technical architecture

The side project becomes a company. I take The Music Fund from zero to a market-ready platform backed by Techstars Music and Warner Music.

1. 1
   Instant Royalty Advances

   A fully automated platform giving artists instant advances in exchange for a percentage of future streaming income.
   Product mindset
2. 2
   5,000+ Artists

   Onboarded while leading full-stack development of the TMF web app.
   Building for artists
3. 3
   Onboarding to Payout

   Artist onboarding, royalty data extraction from distributor portals, offer presentation, customer verification and payment services.
   Full-stack engineering

I relocate to Winton's new US branch in San Francisco, focused on new business ventures, data science and big data, and lead the Data Marketing function.

1. 1
   Touchscreens in Every Office

   Interactive data visualizations of novel datasets, shown live on touchscreens across every Winton office globally.
   Product and design collaboration
2. 2
   The Music Fund MVP

   Built with data scientists and designers — an internal bet that got big enough to spin off as its own company.
   Product mindset

I join a $30B quant hedge fund as a junior engineer, become one of the most trusted engineers serving research and trading, and go on to lead data engineering teams — promoted several times on the way to Vice President.

1. 1
   Leading Data Engineering

   Led data engineering teams and mentored junior and senior engineers.
   Managing engineers
2. 2
   The Interview Loop

   Wrote the technical assessments used to evaluate new hires and ran interview loops.
   Hiring and onboarding
3. 3
   Bloomberg Equities Loader

   Rebuilt one of the firm's most business-critical systems single-handedly: 218 unit tests, a seven-week parallel run, and a rollback plan nobody ended up needing.
   Backend engineering
4. 4
   One Service Layer

   Led the redesign of the core trading pipeline into a single access-controlled service layer spanning ~35 subsystems.
   Technical architecture
5. 5
   30 Minutes to 9

   Made the reference data pipeline 3x faster.
   Backend engineering