Anand Kaushik Parashar

  • IT Solutions Strategy • Execution & Leadership
  • Secure Agile Dev • SMB CyberSec Analysis
  • CompTIA Certified: CCAP CSCP CSAP

Resume

An overview of my skills, experience
and areas of expertise.

Anand Kaushik Parashar

Professional Resume

This page provides an online version of my professional resume with interactive components and links to detailed sections.

Skills Highlights

  • Software Engineering, Architecture and SDLC: Polyglottal programming language software design, distributed systems architecture using DDD, Clean Code and SOLID best practices
  • Cybersecurity: Secure application design, observability and monitoring through robust DevSecOps practices
  • Cloud & Infra Design: Private and Public Cloud Infrastructure solution design and implementation
  • Leadership: Team mentoring, business stakeholder and customer engagement and business-aligned product roadmapping and project management

Professional Summary

Software engineer and distributed systems architect with CompTIA Stacked Certifications: CCAP, CSCP and CSAP certifications specializing in secure systems and DevSecOps practices. Over 15 years of experience across startups and SMEs with a focus on leadership, mentoring, and delivering robust solutions. Agile Secure Software Development Lifecycle, a Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner with in-depth knowledge of traditional/waterfall Project Management workflows and business processes, a Certified CompTIA Project+ professional.

A Decade and a Half: Technical Excellence Through Continual Learning and Agile Best Practices

Since starting my tech career in 2010, I’ve honed a skill-set spanning the needs of startups to small businesses and crossing from full-stack programming, NoSQL (MongoDB) and RDBMS databases through to Cloud Infrastructure and, most lately, Cybersecurity. Over these years, I’ve progressed through many roles required in IT environments: from individual contributor to technical leader, from problem-solver to mentor. I’ve navigated the shift from static HTML/CSS/Javascript websites to dynamic applications, from "pixel-perfect" HTML recreations to mobile-first, responsive PWAs and from monolithic systems to distributed architectures.

A quick list of the skills I've honed over time includes:

Full-Stack Frontend+Backend Development

  • Experience with multiple programming languages on both the front and backends including Typescript/Javascript, Python and my favourite so far, Rust. Other mentionables include Golang, Java, Ruby and PHP - all of which I've used to a much lesser degree over my career.
  • Applications frameworks including Drupal 7 (when I was working solely with PHP), PHP Symfony and the React family: Next.js and Nest.js, and other PWA frameworks like Vue.js/Nuxt.js.
  • Database systems including MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB.

System Design Frameworks and Programming Best Practices

  • I've led the migration of both monolithic and discombobulated-semi-monolithic service based architectures into coherent and scalable microservices architectures.
  • Improved Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, dependent upon fully manual functional, integration and regression testing which, over time, I migrated towards more reliable and consistent pipelines through a mix of custom scripting and automated frameworks including Vitest, Jest and Java+Karate.
  • I'm a proponent and preacher of "Uncle Bob's" "Clean Code" methodologies for software readability, maintainability and scalability.

Cloud Infrastructure

I'm primarily an AWS aficionado but have setup and maintained custom private-cloud VM servers and worked with GCP, Firebase, Vercel and Supabase.

Startup and SMB Project Leadership

  • I've attained my Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner certifications from the Scrum Alliance and had the pleasure of leading/mentoring multiple teams over time in the adoption and optimisation of Agile methodologies including Scrum, Lean and XP.
  • More recently, I took a deep dive into traditional/waterfall Project Management by attaining the CompTIA Project+ - a certification related to and modelled after the PMI PMP. I found learning the structure of the PMI project management perspective insightful and highly structured with many extremely useful techniques and best practices that help maximise stakeholder coordination as organisations scale beyond pre-seed through to Series A and beyond.
  • Having organically been promoted to the role of CTO when employed at BrainFx Inc., I learned about the need for business-to-technology bridging, SMART goals and the use of OKRs and KPIs to enhance collaboration between business stakeholders and technical implementation teams through the value-oriented development of product roadmaps and milestones. My time as CTO also made me acutely aware of the need to incorporate more traditional Project Management practices which lead me to attaining the CompTIA Project+ certificate in order to cement my understanding of the traditional Project Management lifecycle: Discover Initiate Plan Execute and Close - and the activities within each phase.

Cybersecurity

  • Due to my responsibilities over the span of my tech career, I became acutely aware of the need for Cybersecurity to be "baked-in" into every aspect of the Software Development Life Cycle; from the very first conversations about a product, it's data models and business rules, the audience it will serve through the selection of the most innocuous seeming Node.js (i.e. open source / contributed) package.
  • Cybersecurity from the get-go creates a protective shield against liability for the organisation, creates a deeper bond of trust with stakeholders and consumers alike and, enables teams to develop with greater degrees of confidence. More often than not, Cybersecurity is treated as an afterthought, a concern to be dealth with when it actually becomes a concern. By the time this happens though, the damage is done, data is breached and usurped by malicous actors and the organisation is scrambling to save face.
  • I began my road to understanding and implementing Cybersecurity protections and stakeholder communications when, as the CTO of BrainFx Inc., our CEO was working with a Healthcare Network in the US on a pilot program to begin using our cognitive decline detection app. The Cybersecurity team of the Healthcare Network requested the dissemination of BrainFx's own Cybersecurity practices and posture and, I was plunged head first into the quagmire that I described above. By that point, I had already dealt with the discovery of a PHP Shell backdoor implanted on a legacy server and, having received this request for our organisation's Cybersecurity postural analysis, decided that I'd make sure I learned the ins-and-outs of Information Security - to the degree necessary to make informed and effective decisions about technical implementation alongside risk and stakeholder management.
  • During the course of 2025 to 2026, I completed studying for and attaining the CompTIA certifications necessary to fill my knowledge and skill gaps: Network+, Cloud+, Security+ and CySA+.

AI Accelerated Programming / System Integration

  • At the start of 2026, I took a planned and self-guided deep dive into finding out what all the hype that was building up from 2022 through to Nov. 2025 was about: the use of LLMs for programming tasks.
    • The whole concept of using LLMs hosted by servers in the US (@SEE: Patriot Act) was and continues to be deeply disturbing. Industry colleagues that I've compared notes with, more often than not, report that their companies do not consider such issues - especially of the colleague works in a non-regulated sector.
    • Handing off both personal and technical details to unregulated providers in the US was and continues to be, for me, simply unacceptable so, I built my own rig: a 2*GPU (24GB each, AMD Radeon 7900 XTX) desktop rig that runs mid-sized frontier models with as much fluency as one might desire.
    • For longer-context and/or second-perspective tasks, I use Mistral (owned by a French company and fully compliant with the current gold standard of data privacy regulations, the GDPR).
  • Once setting up my rig and selecting a data-respecting Inference Provider was completed, I learned about local inference and trained myself on how to deploy local inference servers using, first, Ollama for its simplicity followed by vLLM for its maximal configurability and, finally, settling on LM Studio for it's "just right, Goldilocks" configurability+ease of use.
  • The final step in this recent journey was focused upon learning how to use "Agent Harnesses". Given the requirement for integration with locally running LLM models, I have learned how to leverage both OpenCode and Pi.dev; the first provides a "point and click" degree of ease and usability in opposition to latter that prides itself on being "hold no bars" and directly specifies that users need to bring their own security and guardrails with them.

The overarching result has been a satisfying balance between sandboxed security and guardrails, data governance and sovereignty and controllable degrees of LLM assistance with next to nil costs and maximal flexibility.