About

Harshad Parchand is a highly experienced Technical Lead at Shell, with over 9 years of relevant experience in the software engineering industry. Currently, he is a part of the Shell Digital Ventures unit, where he leads the technical aspects of two successful products - LubeChat and SolutionsHub. LubeChat is an industry-leading chatbot called Shelly, which provides answers, recommendations, and other information related to oils and lubricants. Shelly is active in 13 markets and has answered over 500K user questions, significantly reducing manual operating costs. SolutionsHub, on the other hand, is a modern web application that allows B2B customers to find the right products for their machines and request various on-site services provided by Shell. Harshad's responsibilities at Shell include establishing software engineering best practices, tooling, and culture, leading the system design and implementation of an in-house NLP capability, and liaising with key stakeholders to manage expectations and prioritize features. He also acts as the Solutions Architect when needed. Prior to joining Shell, Harshad worked as a Senior Software Developer at Algorythma and as a Software Developer at Ola. He holds a Dual Degree in Electrical Engineering and Specialization in Communications Systems from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and completed his schooling from Somalwar High School Ramdaspeth, Nagpur. Harshad's technical expertise includes Golang, NLP, Redis, Spring, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Blockchain, Javascript, Microservices, Integration, Mobile, and Java. He has also worked with New Relic and UI development. Overall, Harshad is a skilled and experienced technical leader who has played a significant role in the success of Shell's digital ventures.