Senior Magento 2 & Adobe Commerce Lead Developer
About
I'm Michael Kuhlman, a Senior Magento 2 & Adobe Commerce Lead Developer in San Diego. I've been building software for about 20 years: websites and software since the mid-2000s, and Magento since 2012.
From 2021 to 2025 I was Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer at Event Network, leading a team of five developers on 18 storefronts for museums, zoos and cultural attractions. I led the Obama Foundation's official store and the American Museum of Natural History's store, working directly with executive leadership at both, and I owned the release process end to end: the Git workflow, pull-request review and approval, and every deployment.
What I was trusted with
- High-profile stores. Institutions whose name is on every order, and whose leadership I worked with directly.
- The release process. I owned the release process: branching, pull-request review standards, staging checks and production deploys. After a deploy broke checkout across the storefronts, I built a Selenium/Chromium regression suite that runs cart, checkout and payment against staging before each release, with monitoring that alerts the team, not customers.
- The systems behind the stores. The ERP and POS integrations that kept inventory, orders and fulfillment in sync between the shop floor and the website.
- Growth and change. Consolidating a long tail of underperforming partner storefronts into one shared platform, which sharply grew partner sales, and leading the company's move from Magento 2 to Shopify.
Career
- Dec 2025 - present
Independent Adobe Commerce & Shopify Consultant
Self-employed · San Diego, CA (remote)
Magento to Shopify migrations and eCommerce builds for merchants, with AI-assisted development as leverage.
- Mar 2021 - Dec 2025
Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer
Event Network · San Diego, CA
Led development on 18 Magento 2 storefronts for museums, zoos and cultural attractions, including the Obama Foundation's official store.
- 2020 - 2021
Backend Developer
Consulting engagement: Taco Bell & KFC supply-chain platform
Built the backend Taco Bell and KFC used worldwide to order, ship, track and receive replacement parts for their restaurant kitchens.
- Jan 2019 - Mar 2022
Co-founder & Full-Stack Engineer
CourseDuck.com (side venture)
Co-founded CourseDuck.com and built it end to end: PHP, a custom CMS, Python data pipelines and ML content ranking.
- 2012 - 2019
Magento Developer, Consultant & Agency Founder
Self-employed
Magento since 2012: a 5/5 rating across thousands of billable hours on Elance, enterprise clients with $10M+ annual revenue, Magento to Shopify migrations, a Magento development agency I founded and ran, and a week-long Magento training workshop in Houston, TX.
The edge: AI as leverage
I use AI-assisted development every day, as leverage on real engineering work, with every change reviewed. I also built Atlas, which puts AI inside the Magento 2 admin (and works for other sites too): an owner describes a change in plain language, Claude Code makes it inside a sandboxed workspace that can only reach that client's own site, Codex reviews it, and a person approves the push to staging and then production. It runs in production on multiple enterprise eCommerce sites, each fully isolated, and deploys with zero downtime; about 1 in 100 releases uses a short, planned maintenance window.
Where I am
I live in Pacific Beach, San Diego. I work remotely with teams anywhere and I'm happy to be hybrid or on-site in San Diego.
Full-time or contractremote, hybrid or on-site