Lead Shopify Engineer/Architect

Description Overview
Body Art Alliance (BAA) is the house behind some of the most trusted names in tattoo, piercing and permanent makeup supply, including Killer Ink, Painful Pleasures, Ultimate Tattoo Supply, FK Irons, Perma Blend, World Famous Ink, NeoMetal and Anatometal. We sell to artists, studios and their clients across the US, UK and EU through Shopify and Shopify Plus storefronts, a Magento storefront for our international business, and B2B portals.

We are moving our storefronts onto one shared Shopify platform and bringing ownership of it in-house. You will architect that platform, lead the migrations onto it with an agency partner, and then own it: the code, the releases and the cost. This is a player-coach role. You write production code and you lead the engineers and partners who build with you.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Architecture and roadmap. One base theme and back end, with brands expressed through presets, settings and metafields rather than forked code, and international handled through Shopify Markets.

- Lead the migrations. Start with our UK/EU business moving from Magento to Shopify, then consolidate the remaining storefronts onto the same base. Plan, sequence and report on the program.

- Manage development partners. Scope, estimate, review and accept agency work against written statements of work, track spend, and bring capability in-house over time.

- Integrations and data. Own the Shopify side of our NetSuite, Snowflake and GA4 connections so orders, inventory, pricing, customers and reporting stay clean.

- Releases and platform health. Repository, environments, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring and peak-season change freezes. Keep site speed, uptime, app count and platform spend moving the right way.

- Build the team. Hire a small engineering team and an AI-assisted workflow (Claude Code or similar) for specs, code, tests and first-pass review, with engineers owning every release decision.

SKILLS:

- Shopify B2B, Markets, checkout extensibility and Shopify Functions

- UK/EU ecommerce: VAT, localization and translation

- Multi-brand, wholesale or PE-backed company experience

- Headless or Hydrogen experience, with judgment on when not to use it

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPI):

- 90 days: You know every store, integration and partner. Spend is baselined, the architecture is signed off and the international replatform is under way.

- 7 months: International storefronts live on the new base. Releases run in-house through the new pipeline.

- 12 months: Remaining storefronts migrated in priority order. One platform, one release process, and development and platform spend below the starting baseline.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS:

- 8+ years in ecommerce engineering, including 5+ years on Shopify Plus serving multiple brands or stores from shared code

- Led a platform migration end to end, ideally Magento to Shopify (data, redirects, SEO, cutover)

- Built or owned an ERP integration, ideally NetSuite

- Led engineers and managed agencies or contractors to scope and budget

- Writes production code today and uses AI coding tools daily

PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS:

- Ability to travel about 10 to 15%, mostly UK/EU

HOW WE HIRE:

A conversation about a platform you architected, a review of a real theme pull request, and a working session on running several brands from one base theme. No algorithm puzzles