Lead Front End Shopify Engineer at VML, London, £Contract Rate

Duration not stated

Contract Description

Lead Front End Shopify Engineer, London

 
 
Created 02/04/2025
Department Technology
Country United Kingdom
City London
 
Who We Are:

At VML, we are a beacon of innovation and growth in an ever-evolving world. Our heritage is built upon a century of combined expertise, where creativity meets technology, and diverse perspectives ignite inspiration. With the merger of VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, we have forged a new path as a growth partner that is part creative agency, part consultancy, and part technology powerhouse.

Our global family now encompasses over 30,000 employees across 150+ offices in 64 markets, each contributing to a culture that values connection, belonging, and the power of differences. Our expertise spans the entire customer journey, offering deep insights in communications, commerce, consultancy, CRM, CX, data, production, and technology. We deliver end-to-end solutions that result in revolutionary work.

Lead Front End Shopify Engineer needed on a contract basis, to join our VML Enterprise Solutions Engineering team.

The opportunity:


To work as a Lead Shopify Developer on an exciting fast paced account, for our client who is a global leader in the health and hygiene market, supporting other developers within the account whilst taking ownership in key tech decisions.

What you'll be doing:

  • Creating high quality production-ready front-end code with Shopify
  • Creating reusable Shopify components and theme areas
  • Architectural decisions to be agreed with Front-end Architect, then implemented and maintained on the project to ensure consistency and quality
  • Drive forward the quality - in code, unit testing, accessibility, performance, code reviews
  • Engaging with the client to understand new requirements or issues and being able to clearly and credibly present potential solutions
  • Ensure a smooth connection with Marketing Tools, Platform APIs, and Shopify Apps to optimise the shop for overall efficiency and functionality
  • Lead an Agile workstream of front-end developers on a project, contributing to daily stand-ups, sprint planning and estimates
  • Ability to converse confidently with technical and non-technical colleagues
  • Build modular layouts, reusable code and libraries for future use
  • Comfortable with a mix of Team Lead responsibilities, effective management of workload, mentoring junior members of the team
  • Work with the design teams to create optimal front-end user experiences, leading to driving greater conversions
  • Collaborating with technical and non-technical colleagues to escalate issues and highlight any areas that need wider team action
  • Cooperate with design and marketing teams to gather and refine specifications and requirements for development
  • Be involved in existing and new integrations for the platform
  • Full end-to-end ownership from idea to delivery, covering ongoing maintenance, expansion and scaling
  • Stay current with evolving standards and technologies, learning new skills as needed
  • Support of the recruitment process in technical tests and team fit assessments

What we want from you:

  • Solid understanding of the Agile methodology i.e. Story point estimation, refinement, sprint planning, retrospective, sprint demos
  • Mastery of semantic HTML5, CSS3 (SASS or LESS) and JavaScript (ES6+) adhering to industry defined coding standards
  • Extensive experience with the Shopify platform and the Liquid templating engine
  • A desire to write readable, maintainable, modular, and extendable code
  • Be an expert in all aspects of the Shopify ECommerce platform
  • Experience of pair programming
  • Have extensive testing and debugging abilities using the browser console and other tools
  • Knowledge of current trends and best practices in front-end architecture, including performance optimization, accessibility, SEO, security and usability
  • Experience of linter/formatter tooling eg ESlint/Prettier etc
  • Commercial experience of using GIT in a large development team performing Continuous Integration
  • Excellent communication skills and capability to interact directly with the team and stakeholders
  • Proficient understanding of fluid responsive layouts, cross-browser and cross-device compatibility issues
  • Commercial experience of unit testing/End to end testing/regression testing (we use Jest and Cypress)
  • Have previous experience implementing/debugging third-party Shopify apps, as well as building unique solutions if needed
  • Familiarity with modern front-end build pipelines and tools such as Grunt and webpack
  • Have working knowledge of third-party services and APIs, as well as Shopify plugins
  • Willingness to contribute to both large, complex projects and smaller tasks as directed.
  • Experience of mentoring junior members of the team
  • Great attitude, self-motivated, strong work ethic, with strong ownership
  • Have experience of solving bespoke customer issues within the Shopify platform

If you know some of this, even better:

  • Commercial experience in building headless solutions e.g SPA and/or PWA applications
  • Experience in building rapid prototypes
  • Experience with a Type Checking language either Flow or TypeScript (we use TypeScript)
  • Experience creating site architecture diagrams, wireframes, process flows
  • Experience of working on Java/Node/C#/PHP projects would be beneficial