Getting hired at Shopify

After working at Shopify for 3.5 years I am starting reflect and writing the first in a series of entries describing different eras in my current employ:

1. Getting hired at Shopify

2. The road to Senior Software Developer (C6)

3. Building the Next-Gen Dev Dash: Front-end to Full-stack

In 2022, at the tail end of the massive hiring surge, Shopify had by this time received tens of thousands of applications. Despite the overwhelming competition, I made it through as a cold application—and eventually became one of just 1% of applicants in the hiring pipeline who were actually hired. I'm sharing that cover letter here:

I am a seasoned pragmatic developer who has experience taking a startup (BookJane) through both Series A and B rounds of funding, working closely on cross functional teams and contributed by continually refining process and outputting high quality clean code.

Cutting to the chase, my big idea for Shopify is:

Building a cloud platform that would help Shopify Partners automate creating a Shopify theme, store and see it in their Shopify Partner Dashboard, ready to collaborate. The cloud platform would simply ask for permission to create a Dawn theme in the user's Github repo, and we could spin up a store using that repository. On each commit, the cloud platform would create a new build for that theme that is ready to publish.

This could introduce a Partner to Github integration, the Dawn theme, give instructions to start developing locally using Shopify CLI, and create a store with a default theme in their Shopify Partner dashboard in one fell swoop! Additionally, it would give the user more control over theme version rollback.

This idea is inspired by Gatsby Cloud: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/products/cloud/

During my time as a freelance designer/developer from 2016 to 2019, I loved the experience of building websites using both Shopify and Gatsby. I believe that Gatsby is one of the fastest growing frameworks because of how easy they make it to start. I can envision Shopify adopting this idea to empower its users and make its tooling and theme development even more seamless.

What has attracted me to Shopify

As a Front End Team Lead at BookJane, I act as a multiplier to my team, supporting them with both compassion and code so together we can build a great product starting from idea to execution. I believe for these reasons that I would fit right in at Shopify and would be able to hit the ground running on the idea I proposed or any other interesting projects you have in mind!

Thank you for your time, I hope to hear from you soon!

Jamie

Some key points I’d like to point out about this cover letter are:

• I mentioned the experience I had and the impact I made there

• I pitched a big idea, demonstrating that I was able to hit the ground running

• I painted a picture of what I could do at Shopify given the opportunity

I am absolutely convinced that this letter is what landed me my intro conversation and first pair session. I know it’s a bold move to give a company your best ideas in a cover letter without expecting anything in return, but the worst that could happen is that they take your idea. However, what loss is that to you if you don’t have the client base or infrastructure to execute it yourself anyway? Unless you are planning on becoming a direct competitor to the company you are applying to, my advice is: Play your best hand.

Almost immediately after I accepted the offer, Shopify released Hydrogen and Oxygen. It felt like dreaming of calculus after Newton and Liebniz had already published their theorems. I was in the right place, but a year too late.

I was placed on the App Developer Experience team and plunged into the Shopify App Domain where I have met a ton of smart and kind folks who I have worked beside tirelessly over the past 3.5 years to improve the Shopify App Development Experience. As of this year’s Shopify Summer ‘25 Edition I am proud to say we have just launched the Next-Gen Dev Platform. The Dev Dashboard and Shopify CLI has my fingerprints all over it. Reflecting back to where I began my journey, I feel proud to share the origins of my Shopify story and this update with you all today.