Engineering at Shopify
Shopify powers millions of businesses in more than 175 countries with essential commerce infrastructure. Our engineers and developers work on challenging and impactful projects spanning frontend, backend, mobile and data.
Our infrastructure is built so anyone can ship fast and ship early. Using Ruby, React, React Native, and GraphQL, our teams continuously deploy new code on a large scale to support hundreds of thousands of online stores and hundreds of millions of requests a day. We build the tools so anyone can start a business and thrive.
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Hear from Shopify Engineers and Developers
Ideas come from everyone—from senior leadership to our interns. Here are a few stories from the people building Shopify.
Mattie Toia
Director of Production Engineering
Working in Prod Eng means you get to see how Shopify really works. We’re able to create a platform that can deliver the same performance whether you are an entrepreneur making your first sale, or a major brand launching their next flash sale.
Ufuk Kayserilioglu
Production Engineering Manager
I love the fact that we can have so much impact in the community by working at different layers of our tech stack, from inside CRuby and developer tools to gradual typing and static analysis.
James Stanier
Director of Engineering
From helping our merchants grow, manage and understand their customers to ensuring that their stores are secure and compliant with global privacy laws, our engineers are having a global economic impact with every line of code that they commit.
Stella Miranda
Senior Developer
At Shopify, we are constantly looking for ways to add monetizable value to our merchants’ businesses. The daily problems I tackle require visualizing ways the billing system might change in the future, and improving the code to be robust and flexible for the long term.
Code locally, ship globally
Shopify started in Canada, but our engineers and developers choose where they work. In 2020, we transitioned to a fully remote company, giving people the flexibility to center their lives around their needs.
- Digital by design
- Cloud-based development environment
- Impact millions of entrepreneurs around the world
Our tech
Shopify is one of the world’s largest Rails monolith codebases, with more than 2.8 million lines of Ruby code and 500,000 commits. We remain opinionated about our tech stack – we’re all in on Rails, and we’re doubling down on React Native for mobile.
Everyone at Shopify has the ability to improve our products, and we do not limit our developers to a prescribed set of tasks. We tackle problems that very few other companies encounter.
We’re intensely focused on improving the developer experience, so our teams spend less time configuring and more time shipping. Read about how we’re changing our architectural patterns to better serve millions of merchants while improving productivity.
How we give back to the craft
We have a deep respect for the craft of engineering and the people who are a part of it—inside and outside of Shopify. Open-source work is essential to our mission, not as a mere side effect. In late 2021, our Ruby engineers built YJIT, a new just-in-time compiler that reaches near-peak performance after a single iteration of any benchmark.
Additionally, our engineers have created open-source themes like Dawn, which maximizes flexibility for merchants, while minimizing complexity.
How we hire
From building apps to developing scalable systems and solving supply chain issues, engineers and data scientists at Shopify play a critical role in shaping the company’s future. Our teams are organized by function, so everyone has the chance to pick a lane—but also grow outside it.
- Backend developers deploy new code daily, removing technical, operational, and financial barriers that prevent businesses from scaling.
- Frontend developers build tools and merchant products in collaboration with software engineers and designers.
- Mobile developers create large-scale apps which can offer entrepreneurs the chance to grow their businesses even more.
- Infrastructure developers maintain critical systems while enabling our teams to work at an ever-greater scale.
- Data engineers build and maintain the platform to power data-driven decision-making at Shopify for millions of merchants.
- Data scientists work closely with engineering and business leaders to solve important problems, champion projects and influence products with data.
Meetups and events
We meet engineers where they are to help them grow their craft—whether that’s online or IRL. Each year, you can find Shopify leaders, engineers and developers speaking at virtual and in-person events such as RubyConf, LeadDev, GraphQL Summit and React Summit.
We also regularly host Twitter Office Hours and AMAs with key decision-makers at Shopify and proudly sponsor developer communities, talks, workshops, conferences, and podcasts.
If your community or event is making our industry more inclusive, supporting the developer craft, or influencing the tech that powers Shopify’s platforms, fill out this form to get in touch.
