Kumar Prabhash Anand

Senior Software Engineer · Berlin, Germany

I build backend systems for a living, mostly in Java. At Zalando, I help parcels find their humans. Outside work I contribute to open source, write about Java and distributed systems, and build small AI tools for developers.

GitHub LinkedIn Medium dev.to

Open source

Things I've built or contributed to

Java · Python

HTTP QUERY method (RFC 10008)

Added the new QUERY method to OpenFeign, then tested, documented and made it retry by default in Spring Cloud OpenFeign and Spring Cloud Commons.

QUERY is a safe, idempotent HTTP method for read-only requests with request bodies.

Companion examples

Claude skill

java-springboot-code-review

Reviews Java and Spring Boot code for the stuff linters miss: @Transactional traps, N+1 queries, IDOR, race conditions.

Claude Code sub-agents

ai-product-team

11 Claude Code sub-agents that work like a small product team: PM, engineering, code review, QA, security, DevOps.

Older experiments

Writing

I also write sometimes

  1. AI & LLM for Software Engineers: 2. Practical LLM Integrations and Building Your First RAG

    A practical Python guide to prompting and retrieval-augmented generation.

  2. AI & LLM for Software Engineers: 1. Key Concepts and Terminologies

    A comprehensive introduction to AI and LLM fundamentals for software engineers.

  6. Don't move to HTTP/2 before reading this

    HTTP/2 is not a silver bullet.

21 articles in total on Medium, plus Java articles written for Baeldung and the odd post on dev.to.

On dev.to:

Experience

Places that trusted me with prod access

Over 10 years, starting Jul 2016.

Mostly Java, Spring Boot and microservices. Also Python, Go, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, RAG and AI agents.

Zalando

Software Engineer, then Senior Software Engineer from Apr 2025 · Berlin, Germany

  • Helping onboard About You warehouses onto the Zalando label platform after acquisition. Lots of meetings. Some code.
  • Designing an Agentic AI system (always-on assistant + incident responder). Teaching robots to read our runbooks so we don't have to.
  • Fixing addresses, automating the painful stuff, surviving peak traffic… and so it goes.
  • Running hackdays and learning sessions for the team.

Siemens

Software Engineer · Pune, India

  • Worked on IIoT platform core systems. Gateway services, 8–10K RPS, the usual anxiety.
  • Cut projected costs by a meaningful amount while keeping SLAs intact. Zero-downtime deploys too. Slept better after.
  • Shipped Freemium features. Turns out free tiers are never actually free to build.

Birlasoft

Software Engineer · Pune, India

  • Built enterprise backends for large clients: microservices, integrations, production fires. Won Employee of the Month once. Still the highlight of my LinkedIn.
  • Delivered a Mulesoft tax integration solo. Still not entirely sure how tax works.

Learning

Courses I actually finished

  • Google Cloud Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure
  • Functions, Tools and Agents with LangChain
  • AI Agents in LangGraph
  • Agentic AI

Degree

Bachelor of Engineering, Information Science and Engineering. SDM College of Engineering and Technology, Dharwad, 2012 to 2016.

Say hello

Say hello. I don't bite.

Always happy to chat about code, design & architecture, AI agents, or what to name a variable.

I speak English and Hindi, and some German.