About

Hi, I’m Prashant Anand, a Machine Learning Engineer based in Tokyo, Japan.

I grew up in the city of Jamalpur in Bihar, an eastern state of India. Fun fact, the railway locomotive workshop in Jamalpur, established in 1862, is the oldest and the largest railway workshop in Asia. After graduating from IIT Delhi in 2019, I moved to Tokyo, Japan, where I’m living for the last 6 years.

From 2019-2025, I used to work at Mercari, Inc. in Tokyo, building production ML systems for Japan’s largest C2C marketplace. At Mercari, I led ML/NLP/LLM applications on Japanese text in Customer Support and Trust & Safety domains. I led the development of ML-driven product moderation system for Mercari Shops. Before that, I shipped features like automatic high-risk inquiry escalation, LLM-powered auto-replies, and intelligent inquiry routing. More details are present on the resume page.

Outside of work, I like photography, brewing specialty coffee, painting, reading (especially poetry), working out in the gym, occasional hiking trips, and building things.

You can find me on common social networks under the handle primaprashant, but the best way to reach me is by email (heyanandprashant@gmail.com). I’m always open to interesting conversations and if you’re in Tokyo, I would be delighted to meet for coffee!