Job Summary
Roles and Responsibilities
Own the end‑to‑end technical architecture for the new Shopify‑based platform
Design and validate the multi‑brand, multi‑market architecture (Shopify Plus, Shopify Markets, separate brand instances) including shared fulfilment and data governance layers.
Define and oversee implementation of the hybrid headless approach (Shopify + Contentful), including content models, rendering strategy, caching and failover behaviour.
Decide and justify architectural choices on checkout extensibility (Shopify vs Shopify Plus vs headless checkout, Shopify Functions) to support split orders, complex fulfilment logic and consent capture.
Lead technical design for critical flows in fulfilment, scheduling, routing and product customisation.
Delivery & Project Management
Act as the technical owner for the project delivery, from discovery through build, testing, launch and hypercare.
Coordinate and mentor a multi‑disciplinary delivery team (Shopify engineers, front‑end devs, QA, DevOps, specialists) and manage day‑to‑day technical delivery.
Work closely with the PM/Programme Lead to manage risks, dependencies and scope; highlight trade‑offs and propose pragmatic solutions.
Ensure robust release, rollback and environment management, including staging, UAT and performance testing. Define resilient integration patterns (webhooks, retries, error handling, logging) that never block checkout and maintain data integrity across systems.
Quality, Performance & Compliance
Set and enforce coding standards, code review practices and non‑functional requirements (Core Web Vitals, routing performance, checkout stability).
Own the error‑handling and resilience strategy, ensuring graceful degradation when third‑party services are degraded or unavailable.
Work with SEO and Analytics stakeholders to implement SEO‑safe migration, URL strategy, redirects, structured data and a robust tracking/data layer that correctly handles split orders.
Ensure compliance with GDPR, PECR, Cookiebot/Consent Mode v2, PCI, and internal security standards (API key management, RBAC, secure webhooks).
Stakeholder & Vendor Management
Translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable language for non‑technical stakeholders (e‑commerce, operations, marketing, franchise network, finance).
Participate in technical discovery workshops, design reviews and steering sessions; challenge and refine requirements where necessary.
Act as the primary technical point of contact for external agencies and vendors, reviewing their proposals and ensuring alignment with the agreed architecture and guardrails.
Support training and handover: document architecture, flows and admin workflows so that internal teams can operate the platform with minimal developer dependency.
Required Experience & Skills
Technical Skills
Strong, proven experience as a Tech Lead / Lead Engineer on Shopify or Shopify Plus projects, ideally including at least one sizable replatform (e.g. Magento to Shopify).
Deep knowledge of the Shopify ecosystem: Liquid, theme architecture, Shopify APIs (Admin/Storefront), Shopify Functions, checkout extensibility, metafields/metaobjects, Markets.
Employment Details
Employment Type:
Contractor
Industry:
IT Consulting
Work space preference:
Work from Home
Ideal work province:
Worldwide
Ideal work city:
Any City
Salary bracket:
R 36000 - 50000
Drivers License:
N/A
Own car needed:
No