Michael Kuhlman

Summary

Experience

1. Dec 2025 - present

   Independent Adobe Commerce & Shopify Consultant

   Self-employed · San Diego, CA (remote)

   • Built Atlas, which puts AI inside the Magento 2 admin: the merchant describes a change, Claude Code builds it in a per-site sandbox, Codex reviews it, and a human approves each push to staging and production, with one-click undo. Atlas runs in production on multiple enterprise eCommerce sites, with zero-downtime deployments outside rare, planned maintenance windows.

   • Built a public demo store three ways with the same catalog: Mage-OS 3.5 (Magento Open Source 2.4.9) on PHP 8.3, OpenSearch and Redis with a custom Luma child theme (m2.michael-kuhlman.com); a headless Next.js 16 frontend over Magento GraphQL (headless.michael-kuhlman.com); and Shopify, migrated through the Admin GraphQL API into a custom Liquid theme. Published a 180-run Lighthouse comparison of all three (compare.michael-kuhlman.com).

   • Leads Magento 2 to Shopify migrations for merchants end to end: catalog, customer and order data, SEO redirect maps, apps and integrations, and cutover.

2. Mar 2021 - Dec 2025

   Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer

   Event Network · San Diego, CA

   • Led a team of five developers; owned the Git workflow, code review and pull-request approval, release management and every production deployment.

   • Consolidated a long tail of underperforming partner storefronts onto one shared multi-store platform, growing partner sales from about $2K a month to six figures a month.

   • Led development of 18 B2C 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.

   • Served as technical lead for 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 stakeholders at both.

   • Led Event Network's replatforming from Magento 2 to Shopify: data-model mapping, catalog, customer and order migration, the SEO redirect map, integrations, and cutover; both flagship stores run on Shopify today.

   • Built and maintained the ERP and POS integrations that synced inventory, orders and fulfillment between in-store and online sales, over REST and GraphQL APIs.

   • Built an automated end-to-end regression suite (Selenium/Chromium) covering cart, checkout and payment that runs on staging and gates every deploy, plus monitoring that alerts the team before customers notice.

   • Developed custom Magento 2 modules, themes and multi-store configuration on a shared codebase; ran 2.4.x upgrades and security patching; owned performance (Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch, CDN), checkout and payments, marketplace sync (Amazon and eBay via M2E Pro), SEO and marketing across the portfolio.

3. 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 restaurant kitchen replacement parts: purchase orders, warehouse and checkpoint receiving, and ERP integration.

   • Built live GPS tracking for large ocean cargo shipments and inland freight.

   • Designed a barcode and QR scanning process with automated weight-based counting for shipping and receiving.

4. Jan 2019 - Mar 2022

   Co-founder & Full-Stack Engineer

   CourseDuck.com (side venture)

   • Co-founded CourseDuck.com, an online-course review site, and built it end to end: PHP, a custom CMS, automated Python data pipelines and ML content ranking.

   • Owned architecture, SEO and growth.

5. 2012 - 2019

   Magento Developer, Consultant & Agency Founder

   Self-employed

   • Freelance Magento developer on Elance (now Upwork): 5/5 rating across thousands of billable hours, about 95% of them on Magento 1 and 2 projects.

   • Founded and ran a Magento development agency for custom Magento 1 and 2 builds; recruited and led its team.

   • Built Magento backend and frontend features for enterprise clients with $10M+ annual revenue.

   • Migrated merchants from Magento to Shopify.

   • Delivered a week-long Magento training workshop in Houston, TX.

Skills

Education