Omar Cotugno

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT OMAR COTUGNO

I build the data platforms that make AI-driven products actually work, reliably, at scale, and fast enough to matter.At MoonPay, one of the world\'s leading crypto payments infrastructure companies, I engineer the data foundations that power smarter products and better decisions across a rapidly evolving fintech landscape.My background spans the full arc from research to production. At Sapienza Università di Roma I published peer-reviewed research at on using autoencoders for anomaly detection in robotic systems, applying deep learning to turn raw system logs into images and detect cyber-security attacks in real time. That academic rigor shapes how I approach every platform I build today: reproducible, observable, and built to fail gracefully rather than silently.Over the past several years I\'ve designed and delivered data systems at scale using Apache Spark, Kafka, HBase, and Python: from real-time performance aggregation pipelines, to distributed messaging monitoring tools, to data analysis frameworks that turn open datasets into actionable intelligence. More recently, my work has extended into ML and NLP: building AI-based solutions that extract signal from complex, unstructured datasets and translate it into business outcomes.I believe data engineering is the unsexy, essential craft that separates AI projects that succeed from the 85% that fail. In a world drowning in data, the real competitive advantage isn\'t the model — it\'s the platform.Core skills: Data Platform Engineering · Apache Spark · Python · Apache Kafka · HBase · SQL · ML & NLP · Data Pipeline Architecture · Data Quality · ETL/ELT · Real-Time Analytics · Fintech & Crypto Data InfrastructureAlways happy to connect with fellow data and AI practitioners, especially in the London fintech and crypto ecosystem. Building at MoonPay means high ownership, fast iteration, and genuinely interesting problems: if that resonates, let\'s talk.