Solutions Architect | A Specialist Ecommerce Studio | Permanent | London, Hybrid (2 days in office) | £70k – £90k

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Solutions Architect | A Specialist Ecommerce Studio | Permanent | London, Hybrid (2 days in office) | £70k – £90k

This is a senior, London-based ecommerce studio that designs and builds online stores for premium direct-to-consumer brands across fashion, wellness, lifestyle, and food and drink. Strategy, design and engineering sit under one roof, and everything they build is headless, mostly on Shopify.

Engineering is the biggest team in the studio and it shows. It’s a close group of very strong engineers who learn from each other, argue about solutions in the open and get properly involved in how the studio works. They’re now part of a much larger global digital group, which brings scale and backing, but the studio still works the way it always has: small, senior teams close to the client.

They’re hiring a Solutions Architect to lead the technical side of a client pod, from the first conversation with the client through to go-live and beyond.

Why this one is worth a look

Tech lead roles in agencies usually go one of two ways. You disappear into tickets and never meet the client, or you drift into management and slowly lose touch with the code. This is neither.

You’d sit in a small, autonomous pod with an Ecommerce Strategy Lead and a Design Lead. The three of you work directly with the client, shape the solution together and then lead the engineers delivering it. When a technical question comes in from the client, it comes straight to you. You’re in the room for the decisions, and you still get your hands on the work. It’s not a feature factory.

What you’ll own

The solution. Working with strategy and design to find the right technical answer to what the client actually needs. Keeping it simple, so that another engineer could pick it up without a pile of documentation explaining why.

The client conversation. Talking to clients about technical approaches, timelines and budgets. Explaining trade-offs in plain English, managing expectations and building relationships that last.

Planning and delivery. Owning the backlog and the roadmap, scoping features against a clear definition of ready and done, estimating, running sprints and stand-ups, and flagging risks early.

Leading the engineers. Typically one to four engineers on your projects at a time. Reviewing pull requests and architecture decisions, unblocking people, mentoring and setting the bar on quality.

Hands-on work. On some projects you’ll build much of it yourself. On others you’ll support the team. Either way, you stay close enough to the code to call it out when something won’t work.

Quality and tech debt. Code reviews, testing, logging and monitoring, and feeding improvements back into the studio’s core way of building.

Who this suits

Someone with 5+ years in a similar role, including agency experience, who has led builds of ecommerce web apps. Headless ecommerce experience is essential, and Shopify Plus in a headless setup is the most relevant.

You’ll be fluent in modern JavaScript (vanilla, React, Vue, Svelte) and comfortable with agile delivery, CI/CD and consuming data from REST APIs. You’ll need a solid back-end grounding, but the work is mainly front end, and anyone who has worked headless will know what that balance looks like. They’d like you to be using AI in your engineering already, or at least getting started.

Above all, you’re driven by solving problems with technology rather than by the technology itself. You have opinions and push them forward, you’re organised, and you’re happy to lead. Quieter thinkers are as welcome as louder voices, as long as you can communicate well with clients.

The one people underestimate: the client side of this is a big part of the job. You’ll be in client meetings and answering technical questions directly, so you need to be able to explain complex things to non-technical people, patiently. And agency pace matters. If you’ve only ever worked in-house, this will be harder than it looks.

If you’ve been contracting or freelancing for the last few years and want to go back to permanent, that’s fine, as long as you genuinely want a permanent role.

A note on seniority. They’ll look at people at slightly different stages. The top of the range is for someone who ticks every box and can step straight into leading the technology side of a pod.

The setup

Permanent, full time. London, hybrid, with a minimum of two days a week in the office. £70k – £90k depending on experience. 27 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, flexible working, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, and an annual performance review.

If you’d like to talk it through, message me here or email nr@redcat-digital.com. Happy to keep it completely confidential.

Neil Rogers | RedCat Digital

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