Senior Staff Developer, Generative AI Themes

About Shopify

Shopify is innovating faster than any other commerce stack. We put independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We transform enteprises and work with some of the world's biggest names and brands who are pushing the limits — and expect us to, too.

While millions of merchants in over 175 countries already use Shopify, the remaining opportunity is vat. This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

About The Role

Shopify’s mission is to make commerce better for everyone. Sidekick, Shopify’s large language model assistant, is a helpful assistant that removes roadblocks on entrepreneurs' journeys so that they can focus on their business.

Our Online Store is the primary channel for the majority of merchants, allowing them to fully represent their brand and sell their products on their own terms. A “theme” is the store design our merchants use to represent their business online. Merchants can choose from a number of first-party (Shopify-made) and third-party (Partner-made) designs in our curated Theme Store.

Now we’re looking to make the customization of those themes more approachable to all merchants by enabling Sidekick to take a merchant’s instructions and make the relevant changes to their store. This requires us to leverage the latest developments in large language models in concert with traditional engineering principles to build the first of its kind system.

We’re looking for someone who can take that challenge and make it a reality.

Responsibilities:

Champion Shopify's technical principles and ensure they are adopted at a mission levelSet and drive the technical aim of Sidekick’s product roadmapProvide technical aiming of high priority, technically complex missions at ShopifyIntuitive shift projects between prototyping phases to discover global maxima and implementation phases to hillclimbEvolve the craft of engineering at the group levelAct as an escalation point for critical projects in need of aiming or technical interventionIdentify ways to simplify Shopify systemsProficiently handle all aspects of the stack, including backend API patterns (GraphQL), network topology, complex state management, rendering (in browser and Node), and best practices for external API calls

Qualifications

Interest and ability to build and iterate in an ambiguous space driven by product goals. This type of role is a fit for entrepreneurial technical founders (prev. CTOs) that have proven experience building a product from 0 to 1.Humility to know when to discard previous solutions when better solutions become apparentWith the nature of this problem space, we are looking for someone that has demonstrated deep interest in generative AI & large language modelsWith the nature of the tight-knit partnership with the Product counterpart, we are looking for hands-on technical leaders that have demonstrated strong collaboration and impact in tandem with their product counterparts.At the Senior Staff level, we expect individuals to be able to pick up new programming languages, libraries and frameworks. Individuals that are proficient in Python and Ruby are preferred.This role is suitable for a true-hands technical crafter, rather than someone who wants to focus on people management! This will be a fast-moving, ambiguous, compact team.

Key Skills

• Backend
• CSS
• GraphQL