Backend
This category focuses on backend, infrastructure, reliability, and programming languages.
From Homegrown to Flink: Migrating a Stateful Ad Event Join at Scale
We replaced a homegrown in-memory stream join with Apache Flink, halved our infrastructure cost, and eliminated... Read more...
Aleksandr Birin
Senior Software Engineer
Jul 24
2026
Client-Side Load Balancing at a Million Requests Per Second
How we built an in-process client-side load balancer for a million requests per second of internal fan-out traffic,... Read more...
Conor Gallagher
Senior Principal Engineer
Jun 23
2026
Introducing Lightstep UQL to PromQL Translator
Automate telemetry query migration from Lightstep UQL to PromQL with this open-source Go SDK and Web UI. Read more...
Maksim Pershin
Software Engineer
Jun 08
2026
Rejecting Invalid Ingress Routes at Apply Time
How Zalando used Skipper as a validating admission webhook to reject invalid filters and predicates at apply time,... Read more...
Veronika Volokitina
Software Engineer
Apr 09
2026
Search Quality Assurance with AI as a Judge
Deep dive into how Zalando builds a search quality assurance framework with LLM-as-a-judge to evaluate the search... Read more...
Tao Ruangyam
Senior Software Engineer
Mar 17
2026
Why We Ditched Flink Table API Joins: Cutting State by 75% with DataStream Unions
The beauty of a high-level abstraction is that it lets you focus on the "what" rather than the "how." In the world... Read more...
Maryna Kryvko
Senior Software Engineer
Mar 04
2026
Paper Announcement: A Practical Approach to Replenishment Optimization with Extended (R, s, Q) Policy and Probabilistic Models
Learn how the ZEOS replenishment optimization system achieves up to 22.1% GMV uplift by unifying probabilistic... Read more...
Alva Presbitero
Senior Applied Scientist
Andreas Syrén
Senior Principal Applied Scientist
Hagop Dippel
Applied Science Manager
Lalita Awasthi
Junior Machine Learning Engineer
Shikhar Dev
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Zhe Nie
Senior Applied Scientist
Jan 15
2026
Contributing to Debezium: Fixing Logical Replication at Scale
How we contributed two features to Debezium to solve WAL growth and enable safer logical replication for our event... Read more...
Conor Gallagher
Senior Principal Engineer
Dec 19
2025
The Day Our Own Queries DoS’ed Us: Inside Zalando Search
Once upon a time, during a normal Sunday, our team ran into an unexpected challenge: an Elasticsearch cluster that... Read more...
Maryna Kryvko
Senior Software Engineer
Ivan Potapov
Senior Software Engineer
Dec 17
2025
Dead Ends or Data Goldmines? Investment Insights from Two Years of AI-Powered Postmortem Analysis
Your incidents hold the blueprint to your most strategic infrastructure wins — if you're listening correctly. Read more...
Dmitry Kolesnikov
Senior Principal Engineer
Sep 25
2025