Forward Deployed Design Engineer

At FUEGO, we're on a mission to make mobile commerce smarter, faster, and more delightful. Our AI-native mobile commerce platform powers the mobile apps of some of the world's most iconic brands such as True Classic, Dossier, Kitsch, Dolls Kill, Simple Modern, DRMTLGY, gorjana, Rainbow Shops, DIME® Beauty, nuuds, Comfrt, Tuckernuck, BYLT Basics®, Portland Leather Goods, VICI, Plug, Cuts Clothing, Gamer Supps, Bombshell Sportswear, Laura Geller, MUD/WTR, Popflex, MaryRuth's, Caden Lane, The GLD Shop, VRG GRL, Pela Case, The Collagen Co., PetLabCo. and many more, giving them a mobile shopping experience as unique as their brand.

Over 10 million Americans shop on mobile apps built on FUEGO. Working directly with the founders, you will get a chance to shape how millions of people shop on their phones every day.

The Role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Design Engineer to own the technical implementation work that turns a signed FUEGO customer into a live, beautiful, on-brand mobile app. This is a customer-facing engineering seat. You are on calls with brands every day. You look at their Shopify store, understand how their data is structured, and wire that data into their app exactly the way they want.

The work is varied and customer-driven. A brand has a request, you understand their Shopify data, you build it cleanly into their app, you ship it, you move on. The volume is high and the variety is real. Every brand has its own data model, its own visual system, and its own priorities.

This role exists because our customers are iconic brands with strong opinions, and they need an engineer on the FUEGO side who can execute cleanly, understand their Shopify setup inside and out, and make their app look the way they want it to look.

If you like the craft of making things work correctly for specific brands and you find real satisfaction in shipping fast, keep reading.

What You Will Own

Customer implementation requests. The core unit of work. Customers arrive with specific needs: a bundle builder with conditional pricing logic, a custom PDP module driven by their metaobject content, a loyalty-gated collection, a segmented push campaign keyed off RFM tiers, or a personalized home feed for repeat shoppers. You scope it, build it, ship it, show them, and move on.

Metafield and metaobject wiring. Most of your work will be taking data a customer already has in Shopify (product metafields, variant metafields, collection metafields, metaobject entries) and surfacing it in their app correctly.

This is the job. You need to be fast at it. Onboarding new customers. When a new customer signs, you audit their Shopify store, map their custom data to FUEGO capabilities, design the initial app configuration, and ship their launch. Typical launches run 2 to 3 weeks.

Ongoing account partnership. The customers you onboard become customers you support. You hold the technical relationship. You know their store. You know what they care about.

On-brand execution. You do not invent new design systems. You match the customer's existing brand system cleanly: their colors, type, spacing, tone. The app should feel like their brand, not like a FUEGO template.

Triage and prioritization. You will have more requests than hours. You decide what ships this week and what waits, in partnership with the customer and our Customer Success team.

Documentation. When you solve something once, write it down. Common implementation patterns become internal playbooks. The next engineer on this team should not have to reinvent what you already figured out.

Feedback loop into product. Customer requests you see repeatedly are product gaps. You surface them to our CTO clearly, with frequency data and concrete examples, so the core product can absorb common patterns over time.

Engineering Bar You need to be a competent full-stack engineer who can ship fast and cleanly. We are looking for someone who moves quickly through high volumes of small-to-medium implementation work without breaking things.

Production React Native experience. This is required, not preferred. FUEGO's customer apps are built in React Native, and so is the work you will do every day. You have shipped React Native code in production: navigation, gesture handling, native module integration, performance debugging, and platform-specific behavior on both iOS and Android.

Production web experience With TypeScript, React, and Node in customer-facing products.

Comfort reading other people's code. You will spend real time inside FUEGO's codebase and inside customers' Shopify themes. Fast orientation matters more than clever architecture.

Git and code review fluency. Clean commits, disciplined branching, professional code review.

Debugging under pressure. When a customer's app is misbehaving in production, you find the issue and fix it. You do not freeze.

AI-assisted development fluency. Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot. You know how to use them to ship faster and where they lead you wrong.

Shopify Expertise Required This is the non-negotiable bar. The entire role is executing inside Shopify data models. Without deep Shopify fluency, you cannot do the job.

Metafields, deeply. Definitions, namespaces, keys, types, ownership models (merchant-owned, app-owned, app-data), standard vs custom definitions. You know the difference between a single_line_text_field and a metaobject_reference and when to reach for each. You have built metafield-driven UI in production.

Shopify Admin API (GraphQL required) You have written production queries and mutations against real stores. You know how to read the schema, traverse connections, and handle pagination and throttling.

Shopify Plus familiarity Shopify Functions, Checkout Extensibility, Flow, B2B, Markets. Most of our customers are on Plus.

Ecosystem fluency You know how Klaviyo, Attentive, Rivo, Recharge, Rebuy, Yotpo, Loop, Gorgias, Okendo, and other similar partners integrate with Shopify. You can debug integration issues across the stack.

Headless awareness Hydrogen, Oxygen, Next.js headless patterns. You do not need to have shipped a headless storefront, but you should not be surprised by one.

Shopify Partner background, Shopify agency implementation experience, or engineering at a Shopify app company are all directly qualifying paths.

Design Sensibility You are not a standalone designer. You do not build design systems from scratch. But you cannot do this job without real visual taste, because the output has to look right on customer brands that obsess over every pixel.

Figma fluency. You can navigate customer brand files, extract tokens, and collaborate with brand teams who live in the tool.

You like customer work. You get energy from shipping something a customer asked for this morning and seeing them react to it this afternoon. If customer-facing work drains you, this role will make you miserable.

You are fast and disciplined. You ship small things frequently. You do not disappear into three-week refactors.

You are a clear communicator. Customers will read your Slack messages, your Loom walkthroughs, and your email updates. Your writing has to be crisp

You are commercially aware. A happy customer renews. A frustrated customer churns. You understand that every implementation request is also a retention moment.

You are coachable. You take feedback on code and on design without ego. You give feedback the same way.

• 3–6 years software engineering with minimum 2 years shipping React Native in production and 2 years deep Shopify expertise (metafields, metaobjects, Admin/Storefront APIs, Liquid, theme architecture); must be comfortable with customer-facing work and high-volume fast shipping.

• Shopify Partner or agency implementation background, Shopify Plus familiarity (Functions, Checkout Extensibility, Flow), ecosystem integration experience (Klaviyo, Attentive, Recharge, etc.), and headless commerce awareness (Hydrogen, Next.js patterns).

• React Native, TypeScript, React, Node.js, Git, Shopify Admin API (GraphQL), Storefront API, Liquid, Figma, and AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude, Copilot).