Ricard Gardella
Senior AI Engineer &
Cybersecurity Specialist
I ship AI in production. And find ways to break it on weekends.
Senior AI Engineer at Checkatrade, building AI-powered features for the UK's leading home improvement platform. Collaborating with Zynap and other cybersecurity companies on AI projects. Outside work: building a private AI-assisted EASM tool and hunting bug bounties.
About Me
Engineer by profession, entrepreneur by natureI'm a Senior AI Engineer and Cybersecurity engineer based in Barcelona with 10+ years of experience building intelligent and secure data-driven systems. My work sits at the intersection of AI engineering, cybersecurity, and data — where robust systems meet secure design.
Whether it's building LLM-powered applications, designing data platforms, or securing AI infrastructure, I bring deep technical expertise and a bias for getting things shipped.
Trusted By
Companies that have trusted my work
Experience
My professional journeySenior AI Engineer
Checkatrade · London, UK (Remote)Building AI-powered features and systems for one of the UK's leading home improvement platforms.
Lead AI Engineer
Zynap · Barcelona (Hybrid)Led Zynap's AI and Data from zero — early hire at the newly founded company.
- Built NINA AI — a multi-agent conversational co-pilot for security analysts (workflow automation, diagnostics, threat intel, malware analysis).
- Designed a high-scale ingestion platform processing 1B+ records/month.
- Migrated critical systems from MongoDB to Elasticsearch — 67.5% faster queries.
- Built a Dark Web threat-intelligence solution spanning 5+ sources.
- Deployed LLMs on local infrastructure for processing highly sensitive data.
Senior Data Engineer
Bitpanda · Barcelona (Hybrid)Led end-to-end design and implementation of Bitpanda's data platform.
- Created +50 ingestion jobs that run in a daily or hourly basis fetching data to Bitpanda's data lake from internal and external sources.
- Rolled out dbt across 4 product teams, decentralising data ownership.
- Mentored 3 engineers and managed interns.
Data Engineer & Tech Lead
Inditex · Barcelona (Remote)Designed data models for Inditex's Sustainability division, delivering ESG reporting used by leadership and regulators across the world's largest fashion group.
Data Engineer
Goin · Barcelona (Hybrid)Built the data pipelines and recommendation API powering Goin's core product — personalised financial insights delivered to 500K+ active users.
Head of Data
Delivery Mates · London, UK (Remote)Built the entire data stack 0→1 as Head of Data for a fast-growing UK logistics startup.
- Designed pipelines, warehouse, reporting, and analytics from scratch.
MSc Computer Engineering & Machine Learning
Universitat Politècnica de CatalunyaEuropean Master's degree. Thesis: "Travel time forecasting using probe vehicle data on freeways" — Grade: 9.5/10
BSc Computer Engineering
Universitat Politècnica de CatalunyaFoundation in computer science, algorithms, software engineering, and systems architecture.
Certifications
Credentials and continuous learning- HTB Certified Web Exploitation Specialist
- Databricks Lakehouse Fundamentals
- Big Data Analytics
- Applied Machine Learning in Python
- Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English (CAE)
Projects
Stuff I've built.AI-Assisted EASM & Bug Bounty Automation
External attack surface management platform with AI-assisted vulnerability discovery and automated recon workflows for bug bounty hunting. I'm the founder and sole developer of this project.
AI Ventilator Assistant
NLP chatbot guiding engineers through DIY ventilator construction during COVID-19. Won the Fraunhofer Institute Prize.
Testimonials
What people I've worked with sayRicard has been leading initiatives in data ETLs, building data pipelines from scratch and a data API that is being used by our Product team to improve the experience of our users in the app. I thank him for that, recommend working with him to anyone interested and remain excited to see what he does in the future!
Iago Novoa
CDO at GoinRicard is a brilliant engineer, not only mastering the technical languages and tools but also holding a powerful combination of soft skills which make it easy and pleasant to work with him. He did an amazing job at Delivery Mates.
