Shopify Team Lead

Job Description Shopify Team Lead (AI-Enabled E-commerce)

Position: Shopify Team Lead – AI-Enabled E-commerce Engineering

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Shopify Team Lead to lead the design, development, integration, and delivery of high-scale Shopify e-commerce solutions.

The role combines Shopify engineering leadership with AI-enabled software development (AI-assisted SDLC / ADLC). The candidate should be hands-on with Shopify and modern web technologies and have experience building and integrating custom applications, APIs, event-driven systems, and cloud-based services.

The ideal candidate will be responsible not only for delivering features but also for driving AI-first engineering practices, improving developer productivity, code quality, automation, and engineering standards.

Key Responsibilities

Shopify Engineering & Architecture

• Lead the development and enhancement of Shopify Plus / Shopify-based e-commerce platforms.
• Design scalable Shopify solutions using Liquid, Shopify APIs, GraphQL, Webhooks, Functions, Extensions and Custom Apps.
• Provide technical leadership for Shopify architecture, integration, performance, security, and scalability.
• Review technical designs, code, pull requests, and engineering standards.
• Work closely with Product, Architecture, DevOps, QA, and Business teams.

Custom Application Development

• Lead development of custom applications and services supporting Shopify.
• Design and develop applications using React / Remix / Node.js or similar modern frameworks.
• Build Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) and API-based architecture.
• Integrate Shopify with enterprise systems and third-party services.
• Design reusable APIs, services, and integration components.

Event-Driven Architecture

Hands-on experience with event-driven systems is expected, including:

• Apache Kafka – producers, consumers, topics, partitions, consumer groups, retry and error handling.
• Shopify Webhooks – webhook registration, processing, reliability, retries, idempotency and monitoring.
• Redis – caching, session/token management, distributed locks and performance optimization.
• Designing reliable asynchronous workflows between Shopify and backend systems.

Database & Backend Engineering

Experience working with:

• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server
• Database design and optimization
• Stored procedures and complex queries
• Transactions and concurrency
• Connection pooling
• Data migration and synchronization
• Caching strategies using Redis

AI-Enabled Engineering / ADLC

The candidate should have experience using AI tools to accelerate the software development lifecycle and should be comfortable working in an AI-first engineering environment.

Responsibilities include:

• Use AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot or equivalent tools for development.
• Apply AI for:
• Requirement analysis
• Solution/design generation
• Code generation
• Unit-test generation
• Code review
• Debugging
• Documentation
• Refactoring
• Test automation
• Lead AI-driven Software Development Lifecycle (ADLC) initiatives.
• Establish effective human-in-the-loop AI development practices.
• Define and enforce AI-assisted coding standards and engineering guardrails.
• Evaluate AI-generated code for security, performance, scalability, maintainability, and architectural compliance.
• Help build reusable prompts, coding patterns, agent workflows, and engineering standards.
• Drive adoption of AI-enabled development across the team.

Team Leadership

• Lead and mentor a team of Shopify engineers and full-stack developers.
• Break business requirements into technical stories and development tasks.
• Conduct design and code reviews.
• Ensure engineering quality and timely delivery.
• Identify technical risks and dependencies.
• Support production issues and provide technical guidance during incidents.
• Promote engineering best practices, automation, observability, and continuous improvement.

Required Technical Skills

Area

Required Experience

Shopify

Shopify Plus, Shopify APIs, GraphQL, Liquid

Shopify Development

Custom Apps, Extensions, Functions, Webhooks

Frontend

React.js, JavaScript/TypeScript

Backend

Node.js / Remix / REST APIs / GraphQL

Messaging

Kafka

Caching

Redis

Databases

PostgreSQL, SQL Server

Integration

REST APIs, GraphQL, Webhooks, event-driven architecture

Cloud

Azure / AWS or equivalent

DevOps

CI/CD, Git, containers, Kubernetes preferred

AI Development

Cursor / Claude / Copilot or equivalent

Architecture

Microservices, BFF, event-driven architecture

AI / Engineering Leadership Expectations

The candidate should demonstrate the ability to move beyond traditional development and adopt an AI-first engineering approach.

They should be able to explain how they would use AI to:

Requirement Design Development Testing Code Review Deployment Monitoring

while maintaining appropriate human review, security, governance, and architectural controls.

Experience with AI agents, AI orchestration, automated PR reviews, AI-based testing, or agentic development workflows will be an advantage.

Good to Have

• Shopify Plus experience
• Experience with high-traffic e-commerce platforms
• Experience migrating from another commerce platform to Shopify
• Experience with Kafka-based integration architecture
• Experience with Azure AKS / Kubernetes
• Experience with Application Insights, Datadog, ELK or similar observability platforms
• Experience with Shopify Functions and Checkout Extensions
• Experience with GraphQL
• Experience with performance optimization and Core Web Vitals
• Experience implementing AI agents / Agentic SDLC / ADLC
• Experience defining AI governance and coding guardrails

Leadership & Behavioral Skills

• Strong ownership and accountability
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills
• Strong communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to mentor and develop engineers
• Strong architectural thinking
• Ability to make pragmatic technology decisions
• Comfortable working in a fast-changing AI-first engineering environment
• Strong focus on quality, scalability, security, and reliability

Experience

7–12 years of software engineering experience, with significant experience in Shopify/e-commerce engineering and at least 2–3 years in a technical leadership role.

Experience leading teams building Shopify + Custom Applications + Event-Driven Backend Systems is highly preferred.

Success in This Role

The successful candidate will help establish a team & fleet of agents that can deliver Shopify features and apps using a combination of:

Shopify + Custom Apps + React + Kafka + Webhooks + Redis + PostgreSQL/SQL Server + Cloud + AI-enabled Engineering

with a strong focus on automation, engineering quality, scalability, and faster delivery through AI.Role & responsibilities

Preferred candidate profile