Why I Joined

Before joining Saturn, I spent time reflecting on a failed startup attempt. I knew I had technical skills, but I lacked the operational and strategic know-how it takes to build a company. I could write code, but that wasn’t enough.

I first met Amal at an AI tinkerers event in Shoreditch. At the time, Saturn hadn’t raised funding, Amal had mentioned some idea, honestly at the time I didn’t fully understand what he was saying, but I could tell he had conviction.

A year later, Saturn had become one of the fastest-growing companies in their YC batch. I reached out, sat down with Amal and Rohit, and realised they possessed the qualities I had lacked in raising a startup. I lacked product-market fit awareness, I didn’t delegate, and I rarely stepped back to strategise. I was in engineer mode - not founder mode. I saw Saturn as a place where I could grow, learn, and contribute meaningfully.

Having worked in finance since graduating from Imperial, the domain felt familiar. It wasn’t intimidating, if anything, it felt like the right place to build.

The Early Days

In the beginning, things were scrappy. We built features off Slack huddles and Notion docs with a single viewer. Sometimes* there were scopes and PRDs, but mostly we ran on momentum.

The old codebase looked chaotic, but it did what it needed to - validated the PoC and served early customers. We had manual F5 scripts to sync CRM data. Press a button, keep an eye on the console and hope for the best. Cowboy stuff, but effective.

We even exposed internal APIs to clients. When I first saw that, I thought, “What the actual fuck.” It reminded me that trust built on shaky foundations is a double-edged sword. That was also the moment I realised we needed to slow down just enough to think, add structure, and build with intention. But we still needed that fast-paced, scrappy style to push through. And while I naturally lean toward thoughtful design and edge-case safety, I’ve learned that in startups, speed often matters more than polish. Sometimes, what you ship today is just enough to get you to tomorrow.

The Transition

Now, Saturn is maturing, technically and culturally. We’re embracing distributed system design and scaling with more structure.

We’re shifting from a single database to a read-replica setup. Performance and resilience are top of mind, but scalability is now a non-negotiable. It’s no longer a nice-to-have; it’s considered into every decision we make.

Having written the migration scripts for moving firms from our legacy platform to the new platform. Each run surfaced bugs. We refined batch writes, optimised reads, tuned memory. We were even manually invoking Python’s garbage collector, rare, but necessary given the memory load. I added a profiler, and Vipul used the insights to further optimise the script. We learned a lot.

We’ve also matured in how we work. Back then, we committed directly to main and stage. Now, we use GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, enforced PR reviews. Scopes are sharper. PRDs are real. We still move fast, but now with purpose.

The Team & Culture

What makes Saturn different is how much people care.

Engineers here take initiative. Bugs get picked up fast. People go the extra mile because they want to. I’ve been on late-night calls, syncing across time zones to make sure features landed by morning. Now, we QA properly. We test. We ship with care.

The bar gets higher with every hire. I genuinely learn a lot from the team, their curiosity, energy, and drive set the tone. Everyone’s proactive. Everyone wants to understand more. That’s what allows Saturn to pursue greatness, because our people do. We’re all growing together. And when we look back N years from now, I think each of us will be proud, not just of what Saturn became, but of how far we each came along the way.

Trust here isn’t duct tape anymore. It’s more like a tempered blade, forged through pressure, sharpened through iteration, and strong enough to hold. That’s the culture we’re building: fast, but thoughtful.

The Future

Saturn isn’t just a meeting notes company anymore. We’re building the AI-native workspace for financial advisers and para-planners — a true operating system for advice. We’re already the leading AI provider in the UK for financial advisory. And it’s just the start.

We will democratise financial access for a billion people.

My Learnings

You don’t need perfect code (there’s no such thing). What you really need is the ability to think clearly, the perseverance to keep going when it breaks, and the curiosity to ask why it broke in the first place. That intellectual curiosity, the need to understand how things work (or don’t) that’s what actually drives good engineering.

When you care, AI becomes your co-pilot. Prompts sharpen. Code gets better. I still keep my cursor on Ask instead of Agent, not because I don’t trust AI*,* but because I don’t want to outsource my ability to think. Curiosity is still my edge, and I don’t want to lose that.

It’s one thing to care, but getting others to care, through clarity, conviction, and trust, that’s real leadership. It’s something I’m learning. And I’m grateful Saturn gives me the space to grow into that