Principal, Commerce Engineering

ABOUT VF CORPORATIONFounded 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 Jan Sport. 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.

POSITION SUMMARY 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.

WHAT YOU WILL DOSet 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.

WHAT YOU BRINGCommerce engineering depth
10+ years of software engineering on commerce systems: catalog, pricing, promotions, cart, checkout, payments, orders, and fulfillment.

Experien…