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, design 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.
   ambiguity to shipped
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.
   consumer products
3. 3
   Spotlight International Expansion

   Took Spotlight to 10 more countries, with Stripe payout infrastructure for artists outside the US.
   cross-functional partners
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.
   technical direction
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 leadership
6. 6
   The Team

   Personally onboarded every new engineer who joined, ran structured 1:1s, and gave coaching and career-development feedback.
   hire, develop, retain
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.
   engineering craft
8. 8
   Jimmy C

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

The Music Fund is acquired by HIFI, a financial rights organization for artists. I integrate TMF's technology into the HIFI platform and lead full-stack development of the royalty data pipeline.

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.
   systems at scale
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 leadership
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 direction
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 all their royalty data in one place.
   consumer products
5. 5
   Cash Flow

   Worked closely with design, business, product and data science on an artist micropayment product, backed by a pricing engine that estimated what each track would earn so artists could be paid in real time. It became the cornerstone of HIFI's acquisition by Block.
   AI/ML-powered product

The side project becomes a company. After the spin-off from Winton, I lead engineering and product development at The Music Fund, backed by Techstars Music and Warner Music.

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.
   ideation through launch
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.
   technical direction
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.
   hands-on leadership
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.
   systems at scale
5. 5
   5,000+ Artists

   Onboarded through continuous product improvement and automation.
   consumer products

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
   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."
   hire, develop, retain
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.
   cross-functional partners
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.
   ideation through launch
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.
   hands-on leadership
5. 5
   The Music Fund MVP

   Spearheaded product development with data scientists and designers — an internal bet that spun off as a standalone fintech company.
   a love of music

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 and grew a team of data engineers, owning hiring, performance reviews and career development, and running the on-call rotation for trading systems.
   systems at scale
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."
   hire, develop, retain
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.
   ideation through launch
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 direction
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. The project-planning method became the engineering org's standard.
   engineering craft