Michael Kuhlman

Service

Adobe Commerce lead development

A lead developer for your Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce team, full-time or contract.

Diagram: eighteen storefronts on one Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce codebase, with caching and search, marketplaces, ERP, point of sale and shipping integrations, and a migration path to Shopify.18 STOREFRONTS · ONE CODEBASEMagento 2ADOBE COMMERCEVARNISHREDISELASTICSEARCHCDNMARKETPLACESM2E ProSHOPIFYMIGRATIONERPsystem of recordPOSin-storeSHIPPINGfulfillmentINVENTORY · ORDERS · FULFILLMENT IN SYNCDiagram: eighteen storefronts on one Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce codebase, with caching and search, marketplaces, ERP, point of sale and shipping integrations, and a migration path to Shopify.18 STOREFRONTS · ONE CODEBASEMagento 2ADOBE COMMERCEVARNISHREDISELASTICSEARCHCDNERPPOSSHIPPINGINVENTORY · ORDERS · FULFILLMENTMARKETPLACESSHOPIFY

I lead Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce teams: custom modules, multi-store, performance, checkout and ERP/POS integrations. Available now, full-time or contract.

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, including the Obama Foundation's official store and the American Museum of Natural History's. I owned the Git workflow, pull-request review and every deployment. I've been building software for about 20 years, and working in Magento since 2012.

What I lead

Architecture and custom development. Custom Magento modules and extensions, themes built on Luma/Blank and UI components, and multi-store / multi-website configurations on a shared codebase. Headless builds with PWA Studio and GraphQL; see it live on my demo store's headless Next.js storefront.

Upgrades and security. Magento and Adobe Commerce upgrades, security patches and Adobe Commerce feature work. With 2.4.6 in extended support only until August 31, 2027, upgrade planning is on most roadmaps right now.

Performance. Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch and CDN configuration, profiling with New Relic, and hosting on AWS and Magento Cloud.

Checkout, payments and marketplaces. Payment gateway integrations, checkout, shipping and fulfillment, and Amazon / eBay marketplace sync through M2E Pro.

Integrations. ERP and POS integrations over REST and GraphQL that keep inventory, orders and fulfillment in sync across in-store and online. How I built them at Event Network.

SEO. Technical SEO for Magento: URL structure, rewrites, canonical handling, and redirects when things move.

Ways to work with me

  • Full-time. A senior or lead Magento / Adobe Commerce role on your team, remote or hybrid / on-site in San Diego.
  • Contract, inside your agency. I founded and ran a Magento development agency myself, so I work to your process and your client relationship. I can lead a build, take a workstream, or rescue one that's in trouble.
  • Contract, direct to a merchant. An Adobe Commerce contractor for a defined piece of work: an upgrade, an integration, a performance problem, an audit or a Magento to Shopify migration.

Background

  • Independent, Dec 2025 - present. Adobe Commerce and Shopify consulting, with AI-assisted development as leverage.
  • Event Network, Mar 2021 - Dec 2025. Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer. Led development on 18 Magento 2 storefronts, including the Obama Foundation's official store and the American Museum of Natural History's; owned the release process, the ERP/POS integrations and the company's migration from Magento 2 to Shopify.
  • Taco Bell & KFC supply-chain backend, 2020 - 2021. A consulting engagement: I built the backend Taco Bell and KFC used worldwide to order, ship, track and receive replacement parts for their restaurant kitchens, integrated with their other ERP systems.
  • CourseDuck.com, Jan 2019 - Mar 2022. Co-founded it and built it end to end: PHP, a custom CMS, Python data pipelines and ML content ranking.
  • Magento freelancer, consultant and agency founder, 2012 - 2019. A 5/5 rating across thousands of billable hours on Elance (now Upwork), enterprise consulting for clients with $10M+ annual revenue, Magento to Shopify migrations for merchants, a week-long Magento training workshop in Houston, TX; I founded and ran a Magento development agency.

AI as leverage, with guardrails

I use Claude Code and multi-model APIs as leverage on real engineering work, with every change reviewed. I also built Atlas, which puts AI inside the Magento 2 admin: Claude Code makes a change in a sandboxed workspace, Codex reviews it, and a person approves the push to staging and then production, on multiple enterprise eCommerce sites with zero-downtime deployments (about 1 in 100 uses a short, planned maintenance window). On an Adobe Commerce team that means I move faster on the routine work and I'm careful about what an AI tool is allowed to touch.

Stack

  • Magento / Adobe Commerce: Magento 2 (2.4.x) & Magento 1, Adobe Commerce, Adobe Commerce Cloud (Magento Cloud), Magento Open Source / Mage-OS, Custom modules & extensions, Multi-store / multi-website, Theming (Luma/Blank, UI components), Headless (PWA Studio, GraphQL, Next.js), Upgrades, security patches & migrations, M2E Pro (Amazon/eBay)
  • Magento architecture & practices: Dependency injection, plugins & observers, Service contracts, Declarative schema, Indexers, cron & queue consumers, MSI (Multi-Source Inventory), Page Builder, Core Web Vitals, PCI compliance, PHPUnit
  • Shopify & other platforms: Shopify, Shopify Plus, Liquid, Shopify Admin API (GraphQL), Magento to Shopify migrations, WordPress / WooCommerce
  • Backend: PHP 8 (OOP), MySQL / MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Python, REST & GraphQL APIs, RabbitMQ / message queues, Composer, Laravel, Git, LAMP / LEMP (Nginx)
  • Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, React (PWA), Knockout.js, RequireJS, jQuery, LESS / SASS, HTML5 / CSS3
  • Performance & infrastructure: Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch / OpenSearch, CDN, Cloudflare, New Relic, AWS, Docker, Linux, CI/CD, Security / WAF
  • Integrations: ERP & POS systems, Payment gateways & checkout, Shipping / fulfillment (ShipWorks), Supply chain & warehouse receiving, Marketplace sync (Amazon, eBay), Data syncing & webhooks
  • Leadership & delivery: Team leadership, Code review & PR approval, Release management, Automated testing (Selenium), Monitoring & alerting, Agile / Scrum
  • AI-assisted engineering: Claude Code, Codex, Custom AI agents & automation, LLM APIs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Gemini), Retrieval pipelines (RAG)
  • SEO & marketing: SEO, Google Ads, Google Analytics

Questions

Are you available right now? Yes. I'm available now for full-time roles and contract work.

Do you work on Magento Open Source as well as Adobe Commerce? Yes, both, and Magento 1 as well. The code base is largely shared; the differences are in licensed features, Cloud hosting and Adobe's support terms.

Can you work on-site? I'm in Pacific Beach, San Diego. I work remotely with teams anywhere and can be hybrid or on-site in San Diego.

We're on 2.4.6. How urgent is it? Standard support ended on August 11, 2026 and extended support ends on August 31, 2027, after which 2.4.6 gets security-only fixes until May 31, 2028 (Adobe lifecycle policy, last checked Oct 13, 2026). Plan the upgrade now rather than in summer 2027.

Working together

  1. Email the brief: your version, catalog size and integrations.
  2. A 30-minute call to go through it together.
  3. A written, fixed-scope proposal.

Hiring for an Adobe Commerce lead?

Send me the role or the project. I'll reply with what I'd need to know and whether I'm a fit.

Email me · Call 707-540-1336 · Download resume

Full-time or contractremote, hybrid or on-site

Need a senior Magento lead? Let’s talk.

Email me Call 707-540-1336Resume PDF