Staff ML Engineer · Barcelona

Data platforms, end to end.

Seven years across the whole data stack — from IoT pipelines and NoSQL systems in Buenos Aires to enterprise lakehouses and data governance in Barcelona. Next chapter: Staff ML Engineer at Factorial.

Portrait of Leandro Szikora Panaia

01About

I'm an Information Systems Engineer (UTN FRBA) who fell in love with data and cloud systems early and never looked back. What I enjoy most is making decisions: weighing the trade-offs, taking the calculated risk, and owning the outcome.

I learn fast and adapt even faster — a skill sharpened by working in multicultural teams across Argentina and Spain. Today I lead a team of four data engineers, and I've had the chance to drive migrations and platform projects that made a real impact at most of the companies I've worked for. The one I'm proudest of: evolving our Unity Catalog governance from a centralized model to a data-mesh approach — each team gets its own lakehouse and works independently — the story I told at the Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026.

This site doubles as a working example of how I build with AI: designed and developed with Claude Code using a multi-agent setup — specialized agents for frontend and CI/CD, plus a custom skill that interviews me to keep the content fresh. The source is public on GitHub, linked in the footer.

Off the clock: fútbol 🇦🇷, mate and coffee (no need to choose), collecting manga and perfumes, exploring every city I visit on foot — and volunteering at a cat shelter, where my two cats fully approve of my career choices.

02Experience

sep 2026 —

Staff ML Engineer upcoming

Factorial · Barcelona

  • Joining the Barcelona HR-tech unicorn to work across the full data & ML stack.
2023 — now

Senior Data Engineer

Schwarz Digits Spain · Barcelona

  • Lead the Data Engineering team (4 engineers) inside the Data Platform team — roadmap and career growth.
  • Design data governance, security and availability features for the Phar Data Platform.
AzureDatabricksAirflowTerraformKubernetesFlink
2022 — 2023

Senior Data Engineer

Oxigent Technologies · Barcelona

  • Designed and supported features for the main data platform of a top client.
AzureDatabricksScala
2021 — 2022

Data Engineer

Etermax · Buenos Aires

  • Built pipelines for business teams with Airflow, Databricks, Redshift and S3.
AirflowDatabricksAWS
2019 — 2021

Big Data Engineer

DBLandIT · Buenos Aires

  • IoT platforms, national agriculture census data mining, TV rating analysis, serverless data lakes.
PySparkAWS GlueMongoDBCassandraRedis
2021 — 2022

Teaching Assistant — NoSQL Databases

Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (FRBA) · Buenos Aires

RedisCassandraMongoDBNeo4JHadoop

03Speaking & Community

Databricks Data + AI Summit 2026 · San Francisco

Phar Lakehouse: The Evolution of Our Data Market

How we turned fragmented storage, auth and governance into a unified, automated process with Unity Catalog and Terraform.

watch

Netcoreconf 2024 · Microsoft Ibérica, Madrid

La revolución de datos de Lidl Plus con Databricks Unity Catalog

The data revolution behind Lidl Plus, powered by Databricks Unity Catalog.

watch

DAIS 2026 Braindate · Host

Challenges in Data Governance for AI Development

Peer-to-peer roundtable on aligning governance with fast-moving AI development.

Sirviendo Código · Community

Aumenta la eficiencia de tus pipelines de datos con Apache Airflow

With Erika Paola Ortiz — nominated for the community's first anniversary awards.

watch

Data Engineering Latam · Community

Creando componentes personalizados en Apache Airflow

Building custom Airflow components, for the Latin American data community.

watch
His data pipelines and tools knowledge and his great ability to learn fast… was decisive for the success of the project.
— Oscar Pulido, Cloud Data Lake Engineer @ Google

04Education & Certifications

B.Eng. in Information Systems

Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Buenos Aires · 2016–2020 · Final project: wine recommendation system on a graph database

GCP Databricks Platform Architect

Databricks · 2025

Ververica Bootcamp (Apache Flink)

Ververica · 2025

Ignite Master Program

Lidr.co · 2025 · Technical leadership

Data Engineer Associate

Databricks · 2024

DAG Authoring for Apache Airflow

Astronomer · 2021

Redis Certified Developer

Redis Labs · 2021