Software engineering consultancy · Est. 2026
Zifrada Labs is a software engineering consultancy with security and privacy at the core. We design, build, and lead dependable systems — from architecture and platform engineering to technical leadership and delivery — for teams that take trust seriously.
About
Zifrada Labs is a software engineering consultancy based in Spain, working remotely with clients across the world. We help companies design, build, and lead software that is understandable, dependable, and safe to operate as it grows — with security treated as engineering work, not a final checklist.
What we do
We work across architecture, leadership, and engineering execution — selected for depth over breadth, and always senior-led.
System design, technology selection, and clear architectural direction for products built to last and safe to operate.
Senior engineering leadership embedded with your team — direction, decisions, and delivery.
Building and evolving product and platform systems with a focus on clarity, longevity, and secure defaults.
Threat modelling, secure-by-default architectures, cryptography choices, and pragmatic security reviews built into the engineering workflow.
Self-hosted models, private retrieval over your data, and AI capabilities that respect your boundaries — for teams that can't send their data to third-party APIs.
Connecting physical devices with reliable backends, protocols, and data pipelines — with device identity and end-to-end encryption designed in from the start.
Featured capability
For companies that can't send their data to OpenAI or Anthropic — self-hosted models, private retrieval, and AI capabilities that respect your boundaries. Your data shouldn't be the price of admission to AI.
We help organisations build AI capabilities that respect their data boundaries: self-hosted or EU-hosted models, private retrieval over internal documents, on-premise inference for regulated workloads, agentic workflows with least-privilege tool access, and clear audit trails for every model call.
Concrete engagements
Selecting, hosting, and operating open-weights models (Llama, Mistral, Qwen) on your infrastructure or in EU sovereign cloud.
Secure retrieval pipelines over internal documents, with access control, prompt redaction, and PII filtering.
Smaller models embedded in products where data must never leave the device.
Prompt injection defences, output validation, model evaluations, and policies aligned with EU AI Act expectations.
Independent review of existing AI features for data leakage, supply-chain risk, and operational soundness.
Approach
We treat security and privacy as engineering work from the first commit. The principles below shape how we design, build, and operate the systems we deliver.
Threat modelling, secure defaults, least privilege, and supply-chain hygiene treated as engineering work — not a final-stage checklist.
Data minimisation, clear boundaries, and encryption where it matters. Privacy is what you get when security is done well.
Code and architecture that stay understandable as teams and products evolve.
Right-sized solutions and clear trade-offs. Shipping over performing.
Experienced engineers from the first conversation through to the last review.
Written-first, asynchronous, with the right amount of synchronous when it matters.
Get in touch
For project enquiries, partnerships, or technical advisory work — send us a note. Confidential by default — we can switch to encrypted email on request. We typically reply within one or two working days.
hello@zifrada.com