Senior Staff Developer, Generative AI Themes
Shopify
Location: Remote - Global
Job Type: Full time
Posted
Company Description
About Shopify
Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 10,000 employees and generated over $500 billion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. Every 28 seconds, an entrepreneur on Shopify makes their first sale.
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 you
Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.
Before you apply, consider if you can:
- Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
- Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
- Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
- Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
- Bring critical thought and opinion — and embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
- Work digital-first for your daily work
Job Description
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 level
- Set and drive the technical aim of Sidekick’s product roadmap
- Provide technical aiming of high priority, technically complex missions at Shopify
- Intuitive shift projects between prototyping phases to discover global maxima and implementation phases to hillclimb
- Evolve the craft of engineering at the group level
- Act as an escalation point for critical projects in need of aiming or technical intervention
- Identify ways to simplify Shopify systems
- Proficiently 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 apparent
- With the nature of this problem space, we are looking for someone that has demonstrated deep interest in generative AI & large language models
- With 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.