Principal Architect, Developer Experience, Shop Builder

About the Role

As a Principal Architect, Developer Experience for Shop Builder, you will be responsible for owning and defining the technical architecture of the platform, ensuring a seamless experience for both AI agents and human developers.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture of the agent-readable Shop Builder platform: which APIs to expose, in what shape, through which surfaces (REST, SDK, MCP, CLI).
• Define the interface contracts that LLMs and developers interact with: React component APIs, custom block schemas, theme tokens, data binding formats — and maintain them with the rigor of a public API.
• Design and lead delivery of the MCP server that allows AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to build, deploy, and operate Shop Builder storefronts end-to-end without the editor in the loop.
• Architect the CLI and local development environment: how developers scaffold projects, iterate locally, preview changes, and push to production.
• Define the deploy, versioning, and rollback model for developer-published content — custom blocks, themes, and layouts.
• Design the sandbox and preview environment system so agents and developers can iterate without touching live partner sites.
• Set the documentation standard: written for LLMs and humans as first-class users, maintained from single canonical sources and published to every surface (CLI help, dev docs, MCP tool descriptions, AI context).
• Lead the eval harness architecture: how the team measures whether an LLM-generated block, theme, or layout is correct before it ships.
• Collaborate with Principal/Staff Engineers across payments, auth, live ops, and catalog to pull inbound capabilities into coherent developer-facing surfaces.
• Serve as the technical bar-raiser for the team: define code standards, review critical implementation decisions, and mentor the Tech Lead and engineers.
• Contribute to hiring and define the technical culture of the team from day one.