About

I studied bioengineering at UC San Diego, which I picked because I wanted to work on something that mattered and didn't yet know that software was the part I would love. Through lab research experiences using Python for data analytics, and building computational models for cellular processes, I realized I'd much rather be debugging a program than a wet lab experiment. So, after graduating I went to Georgia Tech for a master's to go deeper on ML and NLP.

My first job was backend and infrastructure at Salesforce, as a core developer on Apache Solr powering search for our largest CRM customers. I contributed upstream to the open-source SolrCloud community and owned the build, deployment, and health of our services on Kubernetes and AWS. Being on-call across Search taught me incident response and root-cause analysis fast. AI does a lot of that first pass now, but understanding how systems actually fail has made me more effective in these investigations today.

Then I spent four years at Notion on the Databases product team, where I got to work much closer to the people using what I built. I've touched every piece of Databases in Notion, building Icon Picker, shipping Forms from zero to one, building conditional logic in forms end to end, and leading Column Permissions as both tech lead and PM — the projects I've worked on and led have grown in complexity and breadth as I've gained expertise and confidence.

Notion has been where I've honed my skills and gotten to work on so much that I'm proud of, but I've also been a huge part of the culture and making it a warm, vibrant place for people to work. I co-created and was co-chair of Women In Tech for two years, I've led dance classes, started initiatives for people to share their work and career growth, and I'm equally proud of all of this non-technical work :)

Outside of that I read a lot and share my book reviews. I dance, and I try to be a good human/friend/citizen to people online and offline.

I'm based in San Francisco and currently looking out for what's next. I'd love to work on exciting, cutting-edge tech with smart, driven, fun people. If you are building something you think I'd like, I would love to hear about it — saatchi.bhalla@gmail.com.