Shopify

About

Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential.

Everyone at Shopify works on product. Our merchant obsession is built into every layer of our technology, marrying highly resilient infrastructure with cutting-edge methods.

Since 2006, we've grown to over ~8,000 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries.

Featured work

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

Launched in 2026 in partnership with Google, UCP is an open standard that lets AI agents connect and transact with any merchant. It defines a common language across platforms, agents, and businesses — spanning capabilities like catalog, cart, checkout, and identity linking, with support for REST, MCP, and Agent2Agent transports.

SimGym: A/B Testing with AI Shoppers

Traditional A/B testing requires weeks of real traffic to reach statistical significance — a major obstacle for merchants without massive visitor volume. SimGym solves this by deploying hundreds of AI-controlled synthetic shoppers to test store variants in parallel, returning results in minutes.

Each robot shopper receives a persona, budget, and shopping intent, then navigates the real storefront interface — no simulated DOM. The system runs up to 400,000 shopping sessions a day, powered by Shopify's inference cluster and open-source language models on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.

Open Source

Shopify benefits greatly from open-source software, so we make a point to give back. Here are some highlights from our public repositories:

• Draggable ★18k — A JavaScript drag-and-drop library that handles the hard parts so you don't have to
• Flash List ★7k — A high-performance drop-in replacement for React Native's FlatList
• Dawn ★3k — Shopify's reference theme showcasing Online Store 2.0 capabilities
• EJSON ★1.5k — Encrypted secrets management using asymmetric encryption
• Ghostferry ★843 — Live data migrations with minimal downtime, the Swiss Army knife of database tools
• ERB Lint ★742 — A lint tool for ERB and HTML files

Message from Grant

One of my favorite things is to delete code. So often the most stable solution to a problem looks like rethinking it from the ground up, and taking a smaller, more elegant approach rather than adding patches to a first attempt.

This is what made me smile so much in one part of a conversation I had with the Shopify team, where an engineer described presenting a new feature to their CEO, Tobi, who said, "If you were starting today, how would you do it?" The team mentioned a completely different approach, something simpler that they could only see with the clarity of hindsight, and Tobi said, "Great, do that". It didn't matter that the feature was supposed to ship the next day. The preference to do what was elegant and sustainable dominated. Every engineer is familiar with the feeling of only knowing what should be built after making a first attempt; that first attempt is not sunk cost, it's a necessary part of the process. But putting that into practice at scale is so much easier said than done.

This also tracks very well with everything I know about Tobi, who is an engineer at heart, and the emphasis he places on elegance, which has disseminated into the full org. I once had a conversation with him where he observed that people with electrical engineering backgrounds often adapt more easily to management than those with pure software backgrounds. Perhaps it stems from a more deeply ingrained appreciation for minimalism and how best to operate under constraints.

Shopify also strikes me as wonderfully willing to try new and wild things. One year, recognizing the value of the internship program, their head of engineering decided to increase it not just a little bit, but to scale their plans from having 50 interns to 1000. I love that; if you have a strong opinion on something being worth doing, do it all the way.