Alba Software is a small engineering company that works below the surface of the stack. We get called when the database stops keeping up, when the business rules have outgrown the code that holds them, when a service is fast everywhere except in production. We find the real cause, fix it, and write down why, so it stays fixed.
What we work on
- Machine learning
- The kind that shows its work. Search, logic and constraint solving, and models chosen by how much of the data they explain per bit rather than by how many parameters they carry. For problems where an answer needs its reasons attached, where data is scarce, or where approximately right is still wrong.
- Programming languages
- Plenty of hard problems are languages in disguise: the config format that grew conditionals, the pricing spreadsheet with a hundred macros, the rules table that needs a debugger. We design the language on purpose and build everything it needs, down to error messages that tell people what to do next.
- Database engineering
- Schemas that say what the business means, so invalid states can’t be written in the first place. Queries the planner can’t misread. Migrations you can run on a Tuesday afternoon. And when it’s already on fire, the forensics: lock contention, bad plans, replication lag, bloated storage.
- Systems engineering
- Services and infrastructure that have to stay up under load nobody planned for. We work from measurements, not hunches: profiles, traces and packet captures, followed down until the slow part has a name.
Bring us the hard part
Tell us about the system and what it’s doing that it shouldn’t. A few paragraphs is plenty. We take on few projects at a time, and every message is read and answered by an engineer.
Based in Brazil. We work in English and Portuguese.