Michael Kuhlman

Summary

Experience

1. 2025–present

   Independent Adobe Commerce & Shopify Consultant

   Independent · San Diego, CA · remote

   • 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.

2. 2021–2025

   Senior Lead Magento 2 Developer

   Event Network · San Diego, CA

   • Led a team of about 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 and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

   • Led the Obama Foundation's official store (shop.obama.org) and the American Museum of Natural History's store, working directly with executive leadership at both.

   • 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.

3. 2019–2022

   Co-founder & Full-Stack Engineer

   CourseDuck.com

   • Co-founded CourseDuck.com and built it end to end as the only engineer: PHP, a custom CMS, automated Python data pipelines and ML content ranking.

   • Owned architecture, SEO and growth.

4. 2012–2019

   Magento freelancer, consultant and agency founder

   Independent

   • Magento freelancer with a 5/5 rating across thousands of billable hours on Elance, about 95% Magento 1 and 2 projects.

   • 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.

Skills

Profiles