AlphaMerge//Engineering studio · Remote, IsraelAccepting work|Rev 2026.09|
Abstract
A two-person studio that ships systems, not screens.
We build multi-sided marketplaces, commerce platforms and infrastructure software — the domain model, the search cluster, the admin console, the deploy pipeline and the runbook. Then we operate them, because the people who chose the architecture should be the ones woken up by it.
Listings with per-category attributes, Elasticsearch full-text and map search with bbox pins, buyer–seller threads, favourites, saved searches with alerts, user-to-user ratings, reports, and an admin moderation console with user dossiers and event logs.
Commerce
Built 3×
Catalog with stock, cart, Stripe checkout, orders and fulfilment, wishlists and coupons — single-merchant through to multi-vendor. Plus a drag-and-drop CMS page composer, installable PWAs, and a Capacitor Android shell.
Project → product
Our own SaaS
Making one build sellable many times: tenant isolation with per-tenant search routing and rate limits, plan entitlements resolved from the tenant record per request, open-source frontends against a hosted API, and a key attached server-side so it never enters a bundle.
Infrastructure software
PRTG-class
Schedulers and state machines, time-series storage with rollup tiers and retention, remote agents over mutual TLS with disk-spooled results, RBAC, layered configuration validated once at startup, and native installs under systemd and Windows services.
02
Work log
Client work
Rentool
A rental marketplace for the Israeli market — power tools, site plant, access equipment, garden machinery and event kit, rented from people nearby by the day, week or month. Rentals, second-hand sales, services and job postings all resolve from a single listing model.
Infrastructure monitoring at PRTG scale, in Node and strict TypeScript. Probes run checks, the core stores results, evaluates state and notifies. Production is a native service — systemd or WinSW — with PostgreSQL as its only always-on dependency.
You run two nginx containers — the MIT-licensed Angular client and admin. That is the whole stack: no database, no queue, no search cluster, nothing to back up. The API is ours to operate, and your key is attached server-side, so it never appears in a bundle, a network tab, or localStorage.
→Shared multi-tenant, or a dedicated instance on its own hostname
→Plan changes take effect on the next request — nothing to reissue, nothing to redeploy
→Mapbox, Firebase, Stripe, SMTP and push keys rotate in Admin, never in a rebuild
→Fork the frontends and restyle them completely — the licence is MIT
A static SPA makes everything compiled into it public by definition. So the key is never compiled in.
04
Our own products
5 live · android app in testing
Between client work we build our own. All five are live today — NativeChat as a Telegram bot while its Android app is in private testing, and AlphaBrain open to look at but invitation-only to sign into. The two we sell run on the same principle — your data stays where you already keep it; the two we built for fun are where the realtime work gets stretched.
AlphaBrain
Live
A second brain that keeps your notes as Markdown in your own Google Drive and renders the connections between them as a navigable 3D graph — both the links you write by hand and the ones it infers from what your notes are actually about.
Notes are read and embedded in the browser. Only the Drive file id and the resulting vector reach the server. Stop using it and the folder is still yours — readable and editable without the app.
Explicit links + inferred relations from embeddings
Privacy
Embedding happens client-side; note text never leaves the browser
Auth
Google sign-in
DutyDesk
Live
A desktop application that joins WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and Instagram to a single rules system — so a business already selling through chat can automate the replies it repeats fifty times a day.
It runs on the operator's own machine and the messages stay there. Nothing is relayed through us, which is the difference between automating your inbox and handing it over.
Karaoke split across two screens. A TV or laptop becomes the stage; every phone in the room is a controller. The stage shows a QR code, and that is the entire join flow — nothing to install to sing one song at somebody else’s party.
Songs are picked from the phone into a queue the whole room shares, and the stage stays in step with every handset over WebSockets.
The classic card game, played against bots, with friends who have your code, around one screen in the same room, or through a twelve-table story against the regulars by name. The rules live on the server and only there, so a client has nothing to argue with.
The interesting problem is privacy rather than rules: the room state holds every hand at the table, so patches are filtered per client on the way out. A player is sent their own cards and the public table, and never anybody else’s.
Hands filtered per seat before they leave the server
Locales
he · en · ru
NativeChat
Phase 1 live
A voice note in any language, back in yours — as text and as audio. Phase 1 runs as a Telegram bot; phase 2 is an Android app in private testing, working entirely on the handset. Read the brief →
Delivery includes the CI matrix, TLS, backups with a tested restore, and a runbook. A merge that passes is live — no staging theatre, and a documented kill switch.
Decisions, written down
Architecture decision records with the reasoning and the measurements attached. API and sensor references generated from source, so the docs cannot drift from the code.
Degrade, never fail
No search cluster falls back to text search. No CDN key falls back to local disk. No mail server logs the message and drops it. A missing integration is never why a page is blank.
A typo is an error
Configuration is validated once at startup, and an unknown setting stops the process with every problem listed. Silent defaults are how a system lies to you for six months.
07
Notes
3 entries
2026.08
Why we write our own Timescale rollups
We depend on the Community licence for exactly one feature — compression, worth about 10× on disk. Everything above it is ours, so nothing else is tied to the engine.
2026.07
RTL is not a stylesheet
Three products in Hebrew, Arabic and English taught us where direction actually lives: in the data model, the search index and the PDF, not in a mirrored margin.
2026.06
Contracts, signatures and audit trails
What it takes for a rental agreement signed in a browser to still mean something six months later, when one side says it never happened.
08
Personnel
Headcount 2
photo
Roman Michailuck
Co-founder · Product & frontend
Client and admin applications, search and map experiences, i18n and RTL, and the parts users actually touch.