Engineering

João Carvalho

I’m a telecommunications engineer who ended up building companies around technology, product, and transformation. I co-founded Ubbin Labs to create solutions that connect innovation with real execution, not just ideas with potential, but products and experiences that solve tangible problems. My focus is on building technology with practical impact, combining strategy, experimentation, and delivery to turn opportunities into business outcomes. I believe the real value of innovation lies in how it reaches people, improves decisions, and accelerates results. I’m incredibly proud of the team behind Ubbin Labs – they are the ones who turn vision into reality every day.

The platform isn’t dying. It’s changing who it talks to.

Some people argue the era of the software platform is over, and that we’ll soon do everything inside one large language model. I think that’s half right. The work doesn’t…

06/15/2026
ServiceNow Published 64 Pages on People Intelligence. One Line Buried Inside Changes Everything.

ServiceNow just published a 64-page playbook on people intelligence. One buried statistic – only 24% of organisations have formal data cleaning processes – says more than the rest of the…

05/20/2026
Why your agent works on Tuesday: notes from a team building LLM features into a multi-tenant SaaS

We are a small team shipping LLM features into a multi-tenant SaaS. The model is rarely the part that breaks. Capacity, schema drift, prompt caching, tenant isolation – the work…

05/07/2026
One model won’t fit all: what we learned about churn prediction in People Analytics

We built a universal churn model for all our clients. It had a reasonable AUC. Then we ran a backtest and it caught zero actual departures. Here’s what happened next…

04/18/2026
Ten years of multi-tenant SaaS: the decisions we made, and the ones we’d unmake

GFoundry. What held for ten years, what didn’t, and what a small team learns when decisions made in year two still cost you in year eight.

10/03/2025
Stream mining in real time: what we built with Fraunhofer and what we learned

A €378,000 R&D project with Fraunhofer Portugal. MongoDB, ActiveMQ, FP-Growth, K-Means. What we built, what the data showed, and how it became GFoundry.

06/03/2024
How we built a music recommendation engine in 2007 – before Spotify existed in Portugal

Palco Principal. 70,000 tracks, three engineers, no library worth using. The algorithm, the A/B test numbers, and how the 2008 financial crisis ended it.

08/24/2023
Three platforms, one team: shipping for Heathrow Airport

iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia QT — simultaneously. January 2012. What cross-platform mobile development actually cost before any of the frameworks existed.

02/08/2023
What breaks when 20,000 artists depend on your ranking algorithm

Palco Principal had 20,000 artists, 350,000 monthly visitors, and a ranking algorithm none of them could see. Then the 2008 crisis hit. A failure story.

01/19/2023