eCommerce Solution Architect — San Ramon, CA

We are seeking an E-commerce Solution Architect to design and evolve our digital commerce ecosystem across storefront experiences, Shopify, web analytics, and marketing technology. This role owns architecture across the customer journey, from discovery and acquisition through checkout, purchase, fulfillment, and retention. You will partner with business, product, engineering, marketing, and operations teams to translate business goals into scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions.

The ideal candidate combines hands-on technical depth with strong business judgment and understands how storefront experiences, backend services, customer data, promotions, and loyalty work together to drive growth.

Key Responsibilities

• Solution architecture and technical leadership

• Own end-to-end solution architecture across e-commerce storefronts, Shopify, backend services, enterprise applications, and third-party platforms.

• Translate business requirements into solution designs, integration specifications, architecture diagrams, and implementation roadmaps.

• Define system boundaries, data ownership, API contracts, integration patterns, and nonfunctional requirements.

• Evaluate platform capabilities, apps, and vendors; recommend native functionality, third-party products, or custom development based on business fit, cost, complexity, and long-term maintainability.

• Lead architecture reviews, document technical decisions, and guide engineering teams through implementation.

• Establish standards for security, performance, scalability, reliability, observability, and extensibility.

• Frontend and storefront experiences

• Architect responsive, accessible, and high-performing shopping experiences across desktop and mobile.

• Guide frontend implementations using Shopify themes, Liquid, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Next.js and headless frameworks where appropriate.

• Design customer journeys across product discovery, search, navigation, product detail pages, cart, checkout, and customer accounts.

• Partner with UX, product, and engineering teams on personalization, experimentation, and conversion optimization.

• Define frontend integration patterns for content management, search, recommendations, reviews, and other commerce services.

• Shopify platform

• Lead solution design across Shopify including storefront customization, checkout extensibility, and app integrations.

• Design integrations using Shopify Admin and Storefront APIs, webhooks, Shopify Functions.

• Architect solutions for product catalogs, pricing, inventory, customer accounts, discounts, orders, and payments.

• Establish clear boundaries between Shopify-native capabilities, third-party apps, and external services.

• Assess platform constraints, API version changes, and extensibility options before committing to implementation approaches.

• Backend APIs and enterprise integrations

• Design API-led and event-driven integrations connecting Shopify with ERP, OMS, PIM, WMS, CRM, payment, tax, shipping, and customer-service platforms.

• Define REST and GraphQL API contracts, canonical data models, authentication approaches, and data transformation rules.

• Design reliable workflows for catalog synchronization, inventory availability, order processing, fulfillment, cancellations, refunds, and returns.

• Address API limits, idempotency, retries, duplicate events, reconciliation, and exception handling.

• Establish monitoring, alerting, and operational support requirements for critical integrations.

• Analytics and customer data

• Define measurement strategies and event tracking across storefront, checkout, and post-purchase experiences.

• Partner with analytics teams to establish event taxonomies, data layers, tagging standards, and validation processes.

• Architect integrations with web analytics, tag management, customer data platforms, and data warehouses.

• Support reporting on conversion, funnel abandonment, campaign performance, customer retention, and lifetime value.

• Incorporate consent management, privacy requirements, and data governance into solution designs.

• Marketing technology and personalization

• Architect integrations across CRM, email, SMS, campaign management, personalization, and marketing automation platforms.

• Enable customer segmentation and lifecycle journeys, including acquisition, cart abandonment, post-purchase engagement, and win-back campaigns.

• Define customer identity, profile synchronization, consent, and audience activation requirements.

• Partner with marketing teams to deliver new capabilities while managing storefront performance, data quality, and integration complexity.

• Promotions and loyalty

• Design promotion capabilities covering discount codes, automatic discounts, bundles, gifts with purchase, tiered offers, and customer-specific incentives.

• Define promotion eligibility, discount combinations, exclusions, prioritization, and calculation rules.

• Design loyalty integrations supporting enrollment, points earning and redemption, membership tiers, rewards, and referrals.

• Address promotion and loyalty behavior across checkout, order changes, cancellations, refunds, and returns.

• Ensure consistent pricing and reward calculations across participating systems and sales channels.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience in e-commerce solution architecture, technical leadership, or a comparable role delivering complex digital commerce solutions.

• Strong hands-on experience with Shopify, including APIs, integrations, storefront development, and platform extensibility.

• Strong understanding of frontend technologies, modern web architecture, and storefront performance.

• Experience designing backend APIs, middleware, and integrations across enterprise systems.

• Experience with analytics implementation, marketing technology, promotions, and loyalty platforms.

• Working knowledge of commerce domains, including catalog, pricing, inventory, checkout, payments, orders, fulfillment, and returns.

• Ability to design for security, privacy, reliability, and operational support.

• Ability to communicate architectural decisions and trade-offs to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.

• Experience partnering with cross-functional teams and guiding internal engineers, implementation partners, and vendors.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with headless commerce, composable architectures, and multi-brand or multi-region implementations.

• Familiarity with React-based frameworks, Next.js, and modern content management systems.

• Experience with platforms such as GA4, Google Tag Manager, Braze, Attentive or comparable solutions.

• Familiarity with cloud services, API gateways, integration platforms, message queues, and event streaming.

• Experience with omnichannel customer journeys, identity resolution, and online-to-offline commerce.

• Experience establishing architecture governance, technical roadmaps, and engineering standards.

What Success Looks Like

• Business priorities translate into clear, implementable solution designs.

• Customers experience fast, reliable, and consistent shopping journeys.

• Commerce integrations operate reliably, with effective monitoring and exception handling.

• Analytics data is trustworthy and supports meaningful business decisions.

• Marketing, promotions, and loyalty capabilities launch with predictable behavior across the customer and order lifecycle.

• The commerce ecosystem evolves without unnecessary customization, duplicated capabilities, or avoidable technical debt.

Benefits

• 401(k).

• Dental Insurance.

• Health insurance.

• Vision insurance.

• We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity, equality, inclusion, and respect for people.

• The salary will be determined based on several factors, including, but not limited to, location, relevant education, qualifications, experience, technical skills, and business needs.

Additional Responsibilities

• Participate in Zd monthly team meetings and participate in team-building efforts.

• Contribute to Zd technical discussions, peer reviews, etc.

• Contribute content and collaborate via the eP-2wJg/Knowledge Base.

• Provide status reports to Rb bP4V8yS Management as requested.

About Us

Zd is a technology consulting and solutions company, offering advisory and managed services, innovative platforms, and staffing solutions across a wide range of fields including AI, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, and beyond. Our most valuable asset is our people: dynamic, creative thinkers who are passionate about doing quality work. As a member of the Zd team, you will have access to industry-leading consulting practices, strategies & and technologies, innovative training & education. An ideal Zd team member is a technology leader with a proven track record of technical excellence and a strong focus on process and methodology.