Principal, Commerce Engineering

VF Corporation•Greensboro, NC

1d•$159,840 - $199,800

About The Position

Founded in 1899 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, VF Corporation is one of the world’s largest apparel, footwear, and accessories companies. VF’s portfolio of iconic outdoor, active, and lifestyle brands includes The North Face, Vans, Timberland, Altra, Smartwool, Icebreaker, Kipling, Napapijri, Eastpak, and JanSport. VF markets its products across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific through wholesale partnerships, branded retail stores, and a growing direct-to-consumer ecommerce ecosystem. VF is in the midst of a significant transformation, focused on returning the company to sustainable and profitable growth through brand elevation, accelerated digital capability and cost optimization. This role sits at the heart of that transformation—leading the engineering teams that build every digital touchpoint where consumers discover, experience, and purchase VF’s brands. The Principal of Commerce Engineering will own the technical direction of VF Corp's Shopify commerce platform: storefront, checkout, custom apps, and the integrations that connect them to the rest of the business. This is a hands-on role at the top of our individual contributor ladder. You will set architecture, write and review code on our hardest problems, and raise the bar for 10+ engineers 2 teams. VF Corp. runs storefronts on Shopify Enterprise, serving 20+ markets across Americas, Europe and Asia. We are looking for someone with 10+ years building commerce systems, the most recent 5+ spent deep in Shopify. You know where the platform bends, where it doesn't, and when the right answer is a native feature, an app, or custom code.

Requirements

Commerce engineering depth
10+ years of software engineering on commerce systems: catalog, pricing, promotions, cart, checkout, payments, orders, and fulfillment.
Experience with commerce at scale before or alongside Shopify, on another platform or a custom build, so you can judge the platform against alternatives.
A track record of principal or staff-level impact: you have set architecture for a multi-team commerce platform and seen it through production.
Extensive, recent Shopify experience
5+ years, and your most recent 5, working hands-on with Shopify, including Shopify Plus.
Expert in Liquid and Online Store 2.0 theme architecture.
Expert in the Admin and Storefront GraphQL APIs, webhooks, bulk operations, and rate-limit design.
Shipped production checkout work with Checkout UI extensions and Shopify Functions for discounts, delivery, payments, and cart validation.
Built custom apps with Shopify CLI, App Bridge, and app extensions.
Built or led at least one headless storefront on Hydrogen and Oxygen, or an equivalent stack on the Storefront API.
Led at least one major migration or re-platform onto Shopify, or a large upgrade within it such as the move to checkout extensibility.
Engineering fundamentals
Strong in TypeScript and JavaScript, React, and at least one backend language such as Node.js or Ruby.
Integration architecture across ERP, OMS, PIM, and payments, including queues, retries, and reconciliation.
Web performance, observability, and operating through peak traffic.
How you work
You write clear design documents and decision records.
You influence across teams without formal authority.
You can explain a technical tradeoff to a merchandiser or a CFO in two minutes.

Nice To Haves

Multi-store and international experience with Shopify Markets, including duties, currencies, and localization.
B2B on Shopify, or Shopify POS in a unified online and retail setup.
Migration experience from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce (Magento), commercetools, or BigCommerce.
Hands-on work with agentic commerce: UCP, Storefront MCP, or structuring catalog data for AI shopping agents.
Subscriptions, loyalty, returns, or marketplace integrations at scale.
Server-side analytics, consent, and customer privacy implementation.
Published Shopify apps, open-source contributions, or conference talks.

Responsibilities

Set architecture and technical strategy
Own the reference architecture for our Shopify estate: themes, headless storefronts, custom apps, checkout, and integrations.
Make and document the build, buy, or extend decisions, and retire custom code when the platform catches up.
Maintain a 12 to 24 month technical roadmap that tracks Shopify's Editions releases and quarterly API versions.
Build and ship the hardest work
Lead design and delivery of checkout customization using Checkout UI extensions and Shopify Functions.
Build and evolve storefronts in Liquid and Online Store 2.0, and in Hydrogen or other headless stacks on the Storefront API.
Design custom apps on the Admin GraphQL API, with sound data models in metafields and metaobjects.
Architect integrations with ERP, OMS, PIM, WMS, tax, payments, and CRM systems that are event-driven, idempotent, and safe under rate limits.
Own performance, reliability, and scale
Hold the storefront to Core Web Vitals and conversion targets, and prove changes with experiments.
Prepare the platform for peak events such as BFCM, product drops, and flash sales.
Set standards for observability, incident response, and post-incident review across commerce systems.
Keep us ahead of the platform
Plan API version upgrades and deprecation migrations before they become emergencies.
Evaluate new capabilities and decide what we adopt, including agentic commerce through Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Shopify's Storefront and Catalog MCP servers.
Represent engineering with Shopify, agency partners, and app vendors.
Lead without managing
Mentor senior and staff engineers through design reviews, pairing, and written feedback.
Define engineering standards for theme and app development: CI/CD, testing, preview environments, security, and privacy.
Partner with product, merchandising, marketing, and operations, and explain tradeoffs in terms they can act on.