Software engineering consultancy · Est. 2026

Engineering you can trust under load.

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.

  • Barcelona area · Remote worldwide
  • Senior-led · Pragmatic delivery
  • Security by design

About

A consultancy focused on systems you can trust — to work, to scale, and to handle what matters.

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

Focused engagements,
deep execution.

We work across architecture, leadership, and engineering execution — selected for depth over breadth, and always senior-led.

  • 01

    Software architecture

    System design, technology selection, and clear architectural direction for products built to last and safe to operate.

  • 02

    Technical leadership

    Senior engineering leadership embedded with your team — direction, decisions, and delivery.

  • 03

    Product & platform engineering

    Building and evolving product and platform systems with a focus on clarity, longevity, and secure defaults.

  • 04

    Secure systems engineering

    Threat modelling, secure-by-default architectures, cryptography choices, and pragmatic security reviews built into the engineering workflow.

  • 05

    Secure & private AI

    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.

  • 06

    IoT & hardware integration

    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

Private AI, fully under your control.

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.

  • EU AI Act-aware
  • EU-hosted & on-prem
  • Open-weights models
  • No third-party APIs
Talk to us about AI

Concrete engagements

  • Model deployment & operations

    Selecting, hosting, and operating open-weights models (Llama, Mistral, Qwen) on your infrastructure or in EU sovereign cloud.

  • Private RAG systems

    Secure retrieval pipelines over internal documents, with access control, prompt redaction, and PII filtering.

  • On-device & edge inference

    Smaller models embedded in products where data must never leave the device.

  • Governance & guardrails

    Prompt injection defences, output validation, model evaluations, and policies aligned with EU AI Act expectations.

  • AI architecture reviews

    Independent review of existing AI features for data leakage, supply-chain risk, and operational soundness.

Approach

Security-first. Engineering-led.

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.

  • Security by design

    Threat modelling, secure defaults, least privilege, and supply-chain hygiene treated as engineering work — not a final-stage checklist.

  • Privacy by default

    Data minimisation, clear boundaries, and encryption where it matters. Privacy is what you get when security is done well.

  • Maintainable systems

    Code and architecture that stay understandable as teams and products evolve.

  • Pragmatic delivery

    Right-sized solutions and clear trade-offs. Shipping over performing.

  • Senior-led execution

    Experienced engineers from the first conversation through to the last review.

  • Remote-first collaboration

    Written-first, asynchronous, with the right amount of synchronous when it matters.

Get in touch

Have a system worth building well?

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
  • Location Barcelona area, Spain
  • Engagement Remote, worldwide
  • Response 1–2 working days