Amit Times The

Pune. Amit Pile was, by his own account, a pretty normal kid. School, then high school, then the fork in the road every Indian teenager meets in eleventh standard. He took science. Not because he had weighed his options for months, but because everyone around him said science was the best way forward.

And science, in that particular universe, meant engineering. This was before COVID and before social media showed teenagers a hundred other ways to build a life. There was one path, it was well lit, and it led through the IIT JEE.

So he did what everyone did. He ground through mock tests, formula sheets and the special silence of a house where someone is preparing for JEE. Asked whether anyone checked if he actually wanted this, the household declined to comment. So did society.

It is worth saying now, since the rest of this paper depends on it, that the default path was not a mistake. It just turned out to be a starting line rather than a finish line.

JEE didn’t work out. JEE Mains didn’t either. MHT CET was the last route into a good college in Pune, and when the cut-offs came out, Pile had missed them by two or three marks. Not twenty. Not fifty. Two or three.

He wanted computer science more than anything, so he took it at MIT World Peace University. It was a big, famous private college, though not, back then, the most reputed. He was upset. The plan he had chased since eleventh standard simply wasn’t working.

Readers who skip ahead will find that he graduated with a 9.4 CGPA, a national hackathon win and a published IEEE paper. Readers who don’t skip ahead should know that none of that was visible from results day.

Bangalore. Then Fyle was acquired by Sage, the UK accounting software company, and Pile became a Sage employee. The ownership culture survived the merger intact: everyone owns their work.

He became a core part of the mobile team that took Sage Expense Management’s iOS and Android app from very basic to something he is genuinely proud of. It now serves around 9,000 users a day.

He has taken multiple features from zero to one across the web app, the mobile app, the browser extension and other clients. He built Universal Search on his own, from ideation to release, and shipped work on a GenAI receipt pipeline.

And he single-handedly built the entire export system: architecture, implementation and release. Admins can now export every expense, report, file and folder across their organisation in three formats, with more than ten configuration options and a natural-language-to-formula engine for Excel and CSV.

Today he owns mobile app development and deployment, and spends a growing share of his week in customer calls and writing PRDs, engineering docs and product specs. Which is exactly the direction this story has been heading.