Senior Shopify engineering, embedded with your team.

What this is.

Most established DTC brands on Shopify Plus don't need another agency. They need one senior engineer who understands the platform deeply, shows up consistently, and takes real ownership of the technical layer.

That's what a fractional retainer provides. I embed with your internal team, learn the store, and own the work the same way a senior hire would. The difference is scope and overhead: no equity, no benefits package, no three-month recruiting process.

I've done this for connected-fitness brands, specialty fitness equipment, and complex D2C operations. The pattern is the same every time: show up, understand the system, do the work, stay available.

• Theme code and architecture ownership
• App stack health and third-party integration management
• Shopify Functions and Checkout Extensibility builds
• Performance budgets: LCP, INP, CLS
• Ops automations via Flow, n8n, or custom scripting
• Integration projects: ERP, 3PL, subscriptions, B2B
• Migration planning when it surfaces
• Code review and engineering hiring guidance
• Incident response and monitoring setup

$150/hour, billed monthly. 40 hours/month minimum (from $6,000/month). 60-day initial commitment, then month-to-month with 30 days notice on either side. Unused hours roll one month forward, then reset. Major migrations and net-new builds over 60 hours are scoped separately.

I work inside your existing tools (Slack, GitHub) rather than introducing a parallel communication layer. No project-management overhead, and I automate the repetitive work with Flow, n8n, and AI-assisted tooling, so more of every hour goes to shipping instead of busywork.

This engagement works best for established DTC brands, typically at or beyond the $10M/year mark, already on Shopify Plus, with an internal team that needs senior engineering bandwidth rather than a full agency. If you need first-time platform setup or a one-off project under 40 hours, see the project sprint instead.