Communications - Editorial Lead, Engineering & Technical Content

Engineering is Shopify’s DNA. Our engineers ship weekly, open-source obsessively, and use AI reflexively. The work already speaks for itself. Your job is to make sure the engineering world hears it—and cares.

We’re hiring an Editorial Lead, Engineering & Technical Content to own how Shopify’s technical work shows up in public: on our Engineering Blog, on @ShopifyEng, and across the technical communities we publish alongside. This role sits on Shopify’s Communications team, working in tight partnership with Engineering.

You’ll be at the intersection of technical writing, editorial leadership, and content production. You’ll make other people’s work better without erasing their voice, and you’ll step in and write when the story is too important to wait. You should be as comfortable reading a design doc as you are editing a longform blog post, and you should know what actually travels in technical circles: what gets upvoted, what gets bookmarked, and what gets ignored.

This role matters because every engineering surface—our blog, X, open-source circles, and partner platforms—is a vector for the same goal: showing the world that Shopify’s engineering is as ambitious as its mission.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and run the content strategy for the Shopify Engineering Blog, from topic sourcing and triage through development, finalization, and distribution.

• Own and maintain the editorial calendar, turning ideas into a plan, aligning senior engineering stakeholders on positioning and deadlines, and moving content through production to on-time publication.

• Act as the connective tissue between business, Communications, and Engineering, finding the center of the Venn diagram between what’s good for Shopify, what’s good for Engineering, and what’s good for our external narrative.

• Bring technical judgment to every pitch, evaluating novelty, substance, and alignment with priorities, and surfacing original ideas that meet the same bar.

• Embed with Engineering: join R&D channels, team syncs, and technical reviews to proactively identify work worth writing about before anyone pitches it.

• Coach engineers to write pieces they’re proud of, improving structure, clarity, and impact while preserving their voice, and run technical reviews to ensure accuracy and alignment with Shopify’s best interests.

• Write complex pieces yourself when the story sits with someone who has great ideas but limited bandwidth—deep-dive architecture breakdowns, postmortems, and “how we built this” narratives.

• Own content publishing: build posts in our CMS and create or commission supporting assets (header imagery, architecture diagrams, charts, code snippets, and other visuals).

• Define and track KPIs for engineering content, set up measurement across surfaces, and prove impact on readership, engagement, recruiting, and search (traditional and LLM).

• Optimize content for discoverability, including SEO/GEO fundamentals and how LLMs surface and summarize technical material.

• Take full ownership of the @ShopifyEng account on X: voice, content strategy, cadence, community interaction, and audience growth.

• Write consistently for X, turning strong ideas into posts that zoom in on the specific details technical audiences will debate, and engage rather than broadcast through replies, quotes, and threads.

• Develop a framework for channel placement, deciding when content should live on X, on the blog, or both, and how those surfaces reference and reinforce each other.

• Own the editorial pipeline for technical partnerships, identifying and securing opportunities to share Shopify’s work across foundations, open-source communities, and partner surfaces.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience across technical editorial, developer content, technical communications, or engineering, with published work you can reference.

• Strong technical fluency and credibility: able to read technical material, ask questions that uncover the real story, fill gaps, and distinguish substance from noise.

• Hands-on engineering experience is a strong plus, but not required if your technical interviewing and synthesis skills are excellent.

• Demonstrated strong writing craft: precise, structured, and economical prose. You’ve written technical content that practicing engineers have described as excellent.

• Clear understanding of what technical audiences reward—what earns upvotes on Hacker News, what travels on X, and what gets ignored.

• Proven ability to run an editorial operation: multiple pieces in flight, direct feedback on drafts, maintaining a high bar for quality, and saying no to pitches that aren’t ready or aren’t worth publishing.

• High proactivity: comfortable inserting yourself into technical conversations, sourcing stories directly from engineering teams, and not waiting for pitches to come to you.

• Comfort with the operational side of content: metrics, calendars, back-end publishing, SEO/GEO, and the coordination required to keep output steady.

• Ability to build strong relationships with engineers, technical leaders, and Communications partners in a distributed, high-autonomy environment.

Ready to turn world-class engineering work into the stories that shape where the best builders choose to work? Join the team that’s making commerce better for everyone.