Start from the business problem
A technology choice is justified by what the company needs to do next, not by what is newly available.
About
A studio for the hard part of technology.
Rough Diamond Studio exists for the stretch between an ambitious idea and a system the business can trust.
The name is the practice.
Early ideas are often rough: unclear constraints, uneven systems, and potential that is real but not yet shaped. The work is to cut away what does not serve the business and leave something precise.
That takes technical skill and restraint. Not every problem wants a new platform. Not every team needs another tool. The valuable move is the one that makes the company more capable after we are done.
Founder
Pedro Almache
Pedro Almache is an engineering leader and software architect. He has served as CTO of two startups, and he still does the technical work himself.
He co-founded Globonet and was its CTO from 2014 to 2020, leading architecture and engineering for a self-service mobile application platform and taking part in fundraising. From 2020 to 2024 he co-founded Cheap Adventures, a two-person company, and owned the product strategy, architecture, and implementation.
From 2018 to 2025 he was a software architect at ATIMS, on a web-based jail management platform used by law enforcement and correctional agencies. In 2025 and 2026 he was Vice President of Engineering at Memberworks, where he took the product from the first line of code to a multi-tenant SaaS platform, led the engineering team, and introduced AI-assisted development with guardrails.
Rough Diamond Studio is that work continued independently: fractional technology leadership, software architecture, and hands-on engineering. Recent work has included .NET, Angular, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and AWS.
He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from California State University, Northridge. He volunteers with Engineers Without Borders and has mentored early-stage founders through 805 Startups and Hub101.
How the work is held
Three constraints we keep.
Stay close to the work
Strategy and implementation live in the same conversation. Advice that nobody can build is a memo.
Leave something the team can own
The useful outcome is a system, a decision, or a practice that does not depend on us staying forever.
Next step
If the fit sounds right, start with a conversation.
There is no deck to sit through. Tell us what you are trying to change and we will tell you whether we should work on it.
Start a Conversation