Awake before the world
04:52
the minute the studio was born
ROOSTER began at 04:52 on a Tuesday in 2018, in a borrowed office in Lisbon, when two engineers brought a client's dead payments platform back to life ninety minutes before markets opened. Walking home past the Mercado da Ribeira, the only other thing awake was announcing the sunrise at the top of its lungs.
The name stuck because the job description did: wake before everyone else, see the light coming before anyone else, and say so loudly enough that the whole farm gets moving. Eight years and sixty-three launches later, that is still the entire business model.
We are twenty-two people who believe software is a craft with deadlines — that beauty and punctuality are the same discipline wearing different clothes. We build fewer things than we could, and finish every one of them.
Four beliefs, held loudly
BELIEF 01
Punctuality is a feature
A rooster who crows at noon is just noise. We name dates early and hit them — zero missed launches since 2018, a stat we protect more jealously than any award.
BELIEF 02
The demo is the truth
Slides can't crash, which is why we don't trust them. We show running software weekly, from the first Friday to the last.
BELIEF 03
Craft over volume
We run at most five engagements at a time, across a studio of twenty-two. Everything we ship gets senior hands and studio-level finish — including the invoices.
BELIEF 04
Leave the keys, not a leash
Documentation, decision records and handover are deliverables, not favors. The best compliment we get is 'we didn't need you anymore' — usually followed by a new project.
04:30
Recon
We listen in the dark.
05:00
First Crow
We commit, out loud.
05:30
First Light
The shape appears.
06:00
The Build
We ship weekly, visibly.
07:00
Broad Day
Launch, then guard duty.
Numbers we protect
The zero is the one we frame. A rooster who crows at noon is just noise — the entire value of the bird is that it's never late.
2018
founded in Lisbon
63
systems launched
0
missed launch dates
22
people, all senior
9
countries served
99.98%
fleet uptime, trailing year
4.9/5
partner score, 41 reviews
86%
of work is repeat or referral
Seven of twenty-two
All senior, all shipping. Portraits drawn by code, like everything else here — we sell software, not headshots.
Sandro Gallo
Founder & Principal Engineer
Wrote the 04:52 rescue release the studio is named after. Still reviews every launch checklist himself.
Mara Lindqvist
Head of Design Engineering
Shader whisperer. Believes a frame dropped is a promise broken, and has the profiler screenshots to prove it.
Yuki Tanaka
Product Director
Turns founder monologues into one-page bets. Asks 'what number proves this?' at least four times a day.
Tomás Ferreira
Applied AI Lead
Ran ML at a unicorn before deciding evals were more honest than valuations. Distrusts any demo he didn't break first.
Ines Beltrán
Delivery Lead
Keeper of the zero-missed-dates streak. Plans backwards from launch morning, including the pastries.
Dmitri Sokolov
Platform Lead
Has been paged at 3 a.m. on four continents and holds a grudge against all four. Builds systems that let him sleep.
Noor Haddad
Senior Product Engineer
Full-stack in the honest sense — she has shipped the database, the API, the app and the apology email tool.
One perch kept warm.
You, possibly
Senior engineers only
We hire two people a year, slowly and on purpose. If you wake early and finish things, write to us.
Work with us before everyone else wakes up.