Shopify Technical Lead - Digital Commerce

We’re Pentland Brands: a global family business behind some of the world’s most iconic active and lifestyle brands. We bring integrity, energy and ambition to our work, setting high standards and striving to deliver great outcomes without ego.

Design cycling apparel built for movement, endurance and the ride ahead.

At Pentland Brands, every role helps move our brands forward. Whether you’re supporting our people, improving our systems, growing our commercial performance, strengthening operations or shaping better ways of working, your impact reaches across a portfolio of iconic brands used by consumers around the world.

This role is to ensure Shopify delivery is technically sound, scalable, and aligned with business and architecture priorities. The role will convert business and product requirements into robust technical delivery plans, lead technical refinement of user stories, support estimation, guide developers, and ensure integrations across Shopify, ERP, PIM, DAM, middleware, and wider digital commerce platforms are delivered to a high standard.

What you’ll be doing:

Shopify Technical Leadership

• Act as the technical lead for Shopify and DTC delivery within the squad.

• Guide technical design and implementation across Shopify themes, custom storefronts, Shopify apps, APIs, and integrations.

• Assess Shopify-native functionality, marketplace apps, and custom app development options, recommending the most appropriate solution for each requirement.

• Ensure Shopify solutions are scalable, maintainable, secure, and aligned with agreed architecture principles.

• Provide technical guidance to engineers, QA, and delivery team members throughout the sprint lifecycle.

Technical User Story Delivery

• Own technical refinement of Shopify-related user stories, tasks, bugs, and enablers.

• Break down business requirements into clear technical implementation tasks with acceptance criteria and dependencies.

• Support story-point estimation by clarifying complexity, technical risk, integration dependencies, and testing needs.

• Ensure technical stories are ready for sprint planning and are delivered in line with agreed sprint goals.

• Review implementation quality and support resolution of blockers during active delivery.

Shopify Frontend and Backend Capability

• Provide hands-on expertise across Shopify frontend technologies, including Liquid, theme customisation, Shopify sections, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and modern frontend patterns.

• Support backend and integration implementation using Shopify APIs, webhooks, custom apps, middleware, and third-party services.

• Understand and guide implementation across Shopify Admin APIs, Storefront APIs, checkout extensibility, app extensions, and relevant Shopify platform capabilities.

• Ensure technical decisions consider performance, accessibility, SEO, analytics, maintainability, and operational support.

Integration and Ecosystem Design

• Support integrations between Shopify and enterprise systems including SAP or other ERP platforms.

• Work with middleware and integration platforms such as Patchworks or equivalent integration technologies.

• Support integration with PIM and DAM platforms, ensuring product, asset, catalogue, price, inventory, and content flows are understood and technically validated.

• Collaborate with architects and integration teams to define data flows, API patterns, error handling, retries, monitoring, and operational handover.

• Identify integration risks early and recommend practical mitigation options.

Solution Evaluation and Technical Decision Support

• Investigate available Shopify capabilities and third-party app options before recommending custom development.

• Prepare technical options, trade-off analysis, and recommendations for Product Owners, Business Analysts, the Digital Architect, and the Delivery Manager.

• Consider cost, security, performance, implementation effort, vendor risk, roadmap alignment, and supportability when evaluating solutions.

• Support proof-of-concepts or technical spikes where requirements are ambiguous or technically complex.

Team Guidance and Engineering Standards

• Coach and guide developers in Shopify engineering standards, coding practices, integration patterns, and delivery quality.

• Support code reviews, peer reviews, technical walkthroughs, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

• Promote reusable components, consistent patterns, documentation, testing discipline, and maintainable implementation approaches.

• Help the team make technically informed decisions while escalating architecture-impacting choices to the Digital Architect.

Delivery Governance and Documentation

• Maintain technical documentation for Shopify solutions, custom apps, integrations, configuration decisions, and operational handover.

• Ensure JIRA stories contain technical notes, dependencies, acceptance criteria, estimates, and delivery assumptions.

• Support release planning, environment readiness, deployment coordination, defect triage, and post-release support.

• Ensure delivered solutions are supportable by internal teams and vendors after go-live.

What you’ll bring:

• 10-12 years of experience in ecommerce technology, Shopify engineering, digital commerce delivery, or related technical roles.

• Strong hands-on experience with Shopify platform development, configuration, customisation, and delivery.

• Practical knowledge of Shopify frontend technologies such as Liquid, Shopify themes, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and responsive commerce experiences.

• Experience working with Shopify APIs, webhooks, custom apps, third-party apps, and backend integration patterns.

• Experience delivering technical user stories in agile squads, including refinement, estimation, implementation, testing, and release support.

• Good understanding of integration patterns between Shopify and ERP, middleware, PIM, DAM, CRM, analytics, or Martech platforms.

• Ability to assess Shopify marketplace apps versus custom development options and recommend pragmatic solutions.

• Strong technical problem-solving skills and ability to guide engineers through ambiguity.

• Experience using JIRA, Confluence, Git, and standard development collaboration tools.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to product, business, and delivery stakeholders.

Desirable Experience

• Experience with Shopify Plus, checkout extensibility, Shopify Functions, Hydrogen, Oxygen, or headless Shopify patterns.

• Experience integrating Shopify with SAP or other ERP platforms.

• Exposure to Patchworks or equivalent iPaaS / middleware technologies.

• Experience integrating with PIM and DAM platforms for product data and digital asset workflows.

• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, observability, performance monitoring, and production support practices.

• Experience in retail, consumer goods, fashion, footwear, or brand-led DTC commerce environments.

• Awareness of GDPR, PCI-DSS, data privacy, and ecommerce security considerations.

Key Skills and Competencies

• Shopify technical leadership

• Shopify frontend development and theme architecture

• Shopify backend integration, APIs, webhooks, and custom app development

• Technical story refinement and estimation

• Agile delivery support and sprint execution

• Integration design across ERP, middleware, PIM, DAM, and Martech platforms

• Solution option analysis and technical decision support

• Developer guidance, code review, and engineering standards

• Technical documentation and operational handover

• Problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder collaboration

Why Pentland Brands?

Pentland Brands is the name behind some of the world’s best-known sport, outdoor and lifestyle brands, including Speedo, Berghaus, Canterbury, Endura, Ellesse, Kickers and Mitre.

We are a global family business with a clear purpose: pioneering brands that make life better. Across our teams, functions and locations, we work together to create products, experiences and partnerships that help people live more active, confident and positive lives.

Joining Pentland Brands means becoming part of a business where your work can have real reach, across multiple brands, markets, teams and disciplines. It is a place for people who want to contribute, collaborate, improve how things are done and help build the future of brands with heritage, ambition and global impact.

Perks & Benefits

Alongside a competitive salary and discretionary bonus, we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your wellbeing, flexibility, and life outside work. This includes generous holiday allowance, hybrid and flexible working, employee transportation, pension and gratuity contributions, wellbeing support, medical, personal accident & term life insurance cover.

The Interview Process

We want our interview process to feel clear, straightforward, and supportive. If your experience and expectations look like a strong match for the role, here’s what you can expect next:

1. Talent Team Intro Call - A 30-minute video call with our Talent Team to get to know each other, talk through the role and your experience, and answer any questions you have.

2. Experience Interview - A more in-depth interview (usually online) with the hiring manager to explore your skills, experience and approach, and how these align with the role, our principles, and our ways of working.

3. Final Interview - A final in-person interview at our office, focused on deeper discussion and practical application, giving you the chance to meet more of the team and see Pentland Brands in action.