Barrel partners with CPG brands to elevate their online presence and drive growth through e-commerce, website optimization, email, SEO, and content strategy. As a globally distributed team, we are united by a mission to help clients succeed through thoughtful, customer-centric solutions. Our goal is to create experiences that resonate, add value, and build lasting connections with their communities.

The Role

The Technical Architect / Tech Lead owns the architecture of our Shopify Plus commerce platform and the quality of everything that ships to it. They design the systems, run the design and release gates, review the pull requests, write code on the hardest problems, and lead how we use AI coding agents to deliver. This is a hands-on architecture role, not a people-management role; the engineering manager owns staffing and priorities.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of our Shopify ecosystem: storefront (theme or headless), custom apps, checkout extensibility, and the integrations to our ERP, OMS, CRM and marketing stack. Decide what lives in Shopify, what lives in middleware, and what we buy versus build.
• Run the delivery gates: solution design review before build, architecture and security review before integration, release readiness before production. Define the criteria and hold work to them.
• Act as primary reviewer on pull requests, including agent-generated code, and set the standards for code quality, testing, security and observability that both humans and agents follow.
• Write production code on the highest-risk parts of the system: integration layers, checkout and Shopify Functions, data sync and reconciliation.
• Lead AI-assisted delivery: decide which work goes to agents (Claude Code or similar), write agent-ready specs and repository context, define the review protocol for their output, and measure throughput and defect rates against manual work.

Skills & Experience

• 5+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years as the architect or technical owner of a production commerce platform.
• Deep Shopify experience: custom apps on the Admin GraphQL and Storefront APIs, Liquid or Hydrogen storefronts, Checkout UI Extensions and Shopify Functions, Metafields and Markets, and integrating Shopify with ERP, OMS, payment, tax and subscription platforms.
• Experience running formal design and release gates, and a code review record that shows you catch race conditions, missing idempotency and unsafe migrations before they ship.
• Current, hands-on experience delivering production code with AI coding agents, including writing specs for them and reviewing what comes back.
• Strong with TypeScript/Node, Ruby or Python, at least one major cloud provider, and event-driven integration patterns (webhooks, queues, retries).
• Nice to have - Shopify migration or multi-store consolidation under your belt, agency or partner background, experience with NetSuite, Klaviyo, Recharge, etc., and PCI/GDPR familiarity.

Compensation

Salary range for this fully remote position is $120k to $150k, depending on experience and location.