# 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 about 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.** Every pull request reviewed and every deploy mine. 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. ## 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: an owner describes a change in plain language, and Claude Code or Codex makes it inside a sandboxed workspace that can only reach that client's own site. It runs in production for a coaching business, fully isolated from every other project. ## 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. Available now, full‑time or contract. [Email me](mailto:mkuhlman12@gmail.com) · [Download résumé](https://www.michael-kuhlman.com/michael-kuhlman-resume.pdf) ## Career ### Independent Adobe Commerce & Shopify Consultant San Diego, CA · remote · 2025–present - Led Magento to Shopify migrations for merchants. - Built eCommerce and other websites, using AI-assisted development to deliver faster. - Helped companies integrate AI into their businesses: custom agents and automation, multi-model APIs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Gemini) and retrieval pipelines. - Built Atlas, a platform that runs Claude Code and Codex behind a tailored, strictly sandboxed workspace per client, so non-technical owners can safely change their own sites; in production for a coaching business. ### Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer Event Network · San Diego, CA · 2021–2025 - Led a team of ~5 developers; owned the Git workflow, pull-request review and approval, and every deployment. - Led development and maintenance of 18 Magento 2 storefronts for museums, zoos and cultural attractions, including the Obama Foundation, the American Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium, Denver Zoo, the National Gallery of Art, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Missouri Botanical Garden and Mystic Seaport. - Led the Obama Foundation's official store (shop.obama.org) and the American Museum of Natural History's store (shop.amnh.org), working directly with executive leadership at both; both stores run on Shopify today. - Consolidated a long tail of underperforming partner storefronts into one shared storefront platform, which sharply grew partner sales. - After a deploy broke checkout across the storefronts, built a Selenium/Chromium regression suite that runs cart, checkout and payment against staging before every deploy, and added monitoring so failures alert the team, not customers. - Built and maintained the ERP and POS integrations that synced inventory, orders and fulfillment across in‑store and online, via REST and GraphQL APIs. - Custom Magento modules, themes and multi-store / multi-website configuration on a shared codebase; upgrades, security patches and Adobe Commerce features; performance with Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch and a CDN; checkout and payments, marketplace sync (Amazon and eBay via M2E Pro), security and SEO. - Led the company's migration from Magento 2 to Shopify: data-model mapping, the SEO redirect map, integrations and cutover. - Also ran marketing and advertising for the storefront portfolio. ### Co-founder & Full-Stack Engineer CourseDuck.com · 2019–2022 - Co-founded CourseDuck.com and built it end to end: PHP, a custom CMS, automated Python data pipelines and ML content ranking. - Owned architecture, SEO and growth. ### Magento freelancer, consultant and agency founder 2012–2019 - Magento freelancer with a 5/5 rating across thousands of billable hours on Elance (now Upwork), about 95% Magento 1 and 2 projects. - Magento to Shopify migrations for merchants. - Founded and ran a Magento development agency building custom Magento 1 and 2 sites; recruited and led a distributed team. - Enterprise consulting: Magento backend and frontend for clients with $10M+ annual revenue. - Delivered a week-long Magento training workshop in Houston, TX. --- Canonical: https://www.michael-kuhlman.com/about