Yashjeet and Mudit recall the journey of building Alaan for KSA

The logs updated.
Transaction status: Success.
We both stared at the screen for a second. That was it—the first live transaction on Alaan’s KSA stack had just gone through. It worked.

It’s hard to describe what that moment felt like. Not in a dramatic way, but in the kind of way where everything that’s been building up—pressure, learning curves, uncertainty—suddenly clicks into place.
But to get there, we had to unlearn, rebuild, and rethink just about everything.

Some time ago when we joined Alaan, the KSA launch was already in motion. The goal was clear: go live in Saudi Arabia before the end of 2024. What wasn’t clear at the time was how we’d get there.
We’ve both worked on large-scale infrastructure before, but this was different. This wasn’t just about building reliable systems—it was about adapting those systems to a market with its own rules, infrastructure, and pace.
The first major roadblock came early. We realised that AWS, the cloud platform we’d used in the UAE, wasn’t available in KSA. Which meant one thing: move to Google Cloud.

As people who had only ever worked on AWS, we had to start from scratch—diving into Udemy courses, poring over Google’s official documentation, and scrolling through endless Medium posts and Reddit threads. We had to figure out everything; networking, containerisation, deploying microservices, all while racing against the clock. 

The first milestone was setting up a staging environment connected securely to the bank. This involved configuring a VPN tunnel and private networking, and making sure everything spoke the right language—securely and consistently. Sounds straightforward. It wasn’t. The VPN connection worked intermittently. Debugging it felt like whack-a-mole: no clear logs, inconsistent behavior, and pressure to figure it out fast.
Eventually, we cracked it. And then it was time to fly to Riyadh.

It was our first work trip. But more than that, it was our first time stepping out from behind the terminal and working face-to-face with the people who were counting on us. Meeting the teams and tech leads in person changed everything. Decisions that would’ve taken days over email were being made in real time. Issues that felt complex on calls got sorted out over a whiteboard. It reminded us how much faster things move when you’re in the room, building together.
The final testing week was a blur. Every team member was on high alert. One of us monitoring logs, another watching service health, someone triple-checking firewall rules. And when our CEO, Parthi, ran that first transaction—everything we’d built was on the line.

And it worked. 

From an engineering lens, this launch was a big one. We brought Alaan to an entirely new market. We deployed and ran a full-scale system on a brand-new cloud stack. And we did it in less than 90 days. For KSA businesses, that means something real: they can now issue and spend on Alaan corporate cards locally, with the speed and control the product promises—no cross-border workarounds.
But for us personally, it was about proving something deeper.
That we could pick up something unfamiliar and run with it. That we could stay composed under pressure. And most importantly, that we could own a problem end-to-end—and solve it.

What helped was the trust we had in each other, and the leadership we had in Karun. He didn’t micromanage. He didn’t second-guess. He just made sure we had space, context, and backing. That trust made all the difference when things got messy—which they often did.

Looking back now, we don’t think about just the transaction going through. We think about the nights we spent iterating. The moments of frustration when nothing worked. The satisfaction of pushing through anyway.

This project reminded us what engineering really is—it’s not about perfect conditions or clean diagrams. It’s about making things work when they shouldn’t. And doing it with people who care just as much as you do.

If you're the kind of engineer who wants to own problems, move fast, and learn on the job—not just work a job—you’ll feel right at home at Alaan. We have several engineering roles open, and we’d love to meet people with the same drive.