eCommerce Technical Lead (Independent Contractor - Remote in Eastern Europe)

Who are we?

Apex Wheels creates Real Performance wheels for drivers everywhere. That means designing and manufacturing wheels that don’t just look the part, but truly improve performance in a measurable way. Born on the track and raised in California, Apex was founded in 2007 as a passion project by diehard motorsport enthusiasts and has produced function-first, race-proven wheels ever since. Now boasting a team of 40+ staff members, all Apex products are designed by an in-house team of engineers who are just as passionate about motorsports as you.

Objective 

Take hands-on technical ownership of our ecommerce platform, working under the guidance of our CIO and with our eCommerce Director. Ecommerce is a critical engine of our growth, and your job is to make the site a modern sales engine rather than an aging machine that struggles to keep up. You will own architectural decisions for the platform end-to-end, from performance and reliability to the speed at which new features reach production. You will take ecommerce plans and make them real, on time, and on budget, because every delayed launch is growth we leave on the table. 

Job Summary 

You will be taking on a working ecommerce platform that supports real customers and real revenue, with a codebase that reflects years of accumulated work. Some of it is sound. Some of it is not. Your responsibility is to identify the difference through direct, hands-on engagement with the code and to implement the improvements yourself. This is a hands-on senior engineering role. The challenge is to materially improve a system that is already in production, while continuing to deliver new work in parallel.

The majority of your time will be spent writing and reviewing code. You will be the engineer who reads the existing implementation closely, refactors what is holding the platform back, and establishes the patterns that subsequent work will follow. When integrations between commerce, ERP, payments, content, and search behave unreliably, you will trace the issue end-to-end and implement the fix. When a deployment fails, you will be in the logs. When performance degrades, you will be the engineer running the profiler and identifying the actual cause. The technical standard of the platform will reflect the standard of the code you ship, because your work will set the precedent for others.

You will also review contributions from internal developers and external agencies, but review in this context means substantive engineering review. You will identify defects, missed edge cases, and shortcuts that will create cost later. You will provide specific, actionable feedback. When work requires significant revision, you will say so directly, and in many cases, you will be the one to implement the correction.

You will work closely with the CIO and the eCommerce Director, contributing to day-to-day execution while helping ensure that technical decisions are sound and aligned with business needs. You will be expected to challenge assumptions, including those of external partners and internal contributors, when they conflict with platform health or critical business outcomes. When it comes to communicating with stakeholders, you should be able to explain your thinking, highlight tradeoffs, be transparent about unknowns, and the impact of your work. Your proactive communication on progress, status, and blockers will help you to gain the trust of our deeply passionate team, enabling you to grow to the next level in this role. 

To start, you will be the only dedicated internal engineer on e-commerce, with oversight of external agencies and contractors as the primary form of leverage. We expect that this position will include people-management over time. What will not change is the expectation that you remain in the code - this is not a role that will evolve into pure delegation, and it is not a role for someone eager to stop building.

Once the foundation is stable, the focus moves toward feature delivery. Sales and marketing have a meaningful backlog of initiatives, and the measure of success becomes how quickly we can ship them to production at the appropriate level of quality. That is the return on the work: a platform on which the next change is easier than the last.

We are looking for an engineer who has held a similar position before. You have been the senior technical contributor on a platform of comparable complexity. You have been the person other engineers turn to when a problem is genuinely difficult. You have inherited a codebase with technical debt and improved it incrementally. You understand the work involved, and you understand that much of it is detailed and unglamorous. If you are looking for a clean slate or a role that keeps you removed from the code itself, this position will not be the right fit.

If it is the kind of challenge you have been looking for, the reward for doing it well is that the work shows. Internally, your contributions will move the company toward the targets it is planning to hit, and the teams that rely on the platform will tell you when something you built made their job more impactful. Externally, our customers are passionate about our products and are quick to share when the experience lands well, and you will know that the experience they are talking about is one you helped create.

How to Apply

In the space provided for your cover letter, tell us about your connection to automotive or motorsports culture. If you’re not an enthusiast, tell us what you are most passionate about outside of your professional work.

Responsibilities

• Own the execution of the technical direction, quality, and uptime of our ecommerce platform and its integrations. The eCommerce Director will help you keep business objectives sharp and prioritized. The CIO will help you navigate technical boundaries and the standards that apply across the company. 
• Lead the backend of our platform (Magento 2 implemented by an experienced contractor) side through substantive review: setting quality gates, holding the work to schedule, and stepping into the code when a decision needs senior judgment. 
• Write, review, and ship our front-end code (Vue 3 and Nuxt for storefront, Sanity for content) alongside our partnered agency, and drive the work to reduce technical debt through whatever means make sense, including refactoring, replacing patterns, and over time bringing more of the work in-house as we grow the internal team. This is the area where the platform is actively expanding and where the technical debt is most visible. 
• Own the integrations between Magento and the systems it depends on, including ERP (NetSuite), payments, OMS, PIM, and CMS. Real ecommerce problems will come to you: checkout friction, returns workflows, performance bottlenecks, data consistency, and third-party reliability. You will take loosely defined problems, define constraints and tradeoffs, and turn them into clear technical approaches. 
• You will be involved when production issues arise, and you will contribute to improving monitoring, deployment, and reliability over time. Conduct substantive engineering review on code from internal contributors and external agencies: catching defects, missed edge cases, and shortcuts that will create cost later, and giving specific, actionable feedback. You will push back on external recommendations that conflict with platform health or long-term business outcomes.
• Help establish and reinforce standards for code quality, documentation, and development workflows, so rework drops and predictability rises. The goal is lightweight, effective processes that scale as the team grows.
• Eventually, we see this role including direct people-management responsibilities, including hiring, performance management, exiting, and everything in between.
• Other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years building and operating complex ecommerce platforms at scale (Magento 2, Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, or equivalent), and meaningful, recent ecommerce work - not a strong background that has since gone stale. Generalist backgrounds without current ecommerce depth will not be a fit.
• Strong in JavaScript and TypeScript, with hands-on experience shipping production work in Vue 3 and Nuxt, or a comparable framework such as Next and React. Production experience with a headless CMS, ideally Sanity. 
• Demonstrable experience with a headless or decoupled frontend architecture integrated with a commerce backend. Experience integrating ecommerce platforms with ERP systems (NetSuite is a plus; SAP, Dynamics, Salesforce, or similar are acceptable) and a track record of owning multi-system integrations across payments, OMS, PIM, search, and CDP.
• Hands-on experience with caching at the platform level, including Varnish, Redis, or equivalent. 
• Solid, practical grounding in CI/CD, code review, monitoring, and incident response. Theory is not enough.
• A solid understanding of UI and UX principles, with the ability to evaluate frontend work on more than just whether it functions. You do not need to be a designer, but you should care about the experience the code produces.
• Experience working with external agencies and vendors, including scoping work, reviewing deliverables, and pushing back on weak recommendations. The role is built around this dynamic, so a track record of doing it well matters.
• Familiarity with PHP and Magento 2 is a plus, sufficient to follow the code, weigh in on architectural decisions, and review work from the backend contractor. You do not need to be a Magento specialist. Most backend implementation is handled by an experienced contractor, and your role on that side is to hold the line on quality, schedule, and direction.
• Additional pluses include early technical leadership (tech lead on a squad, mentoring, or running code review culture), Magento 2 frontend modernization experience such as Hyvä or PWA Studio, and background with Elasticsearch or Algolia.

Benefits

Compensation $35 - $48 USD hourly. This is a long-term independent contractor position supporting a U.S.-based company. Candidates must be able to work as self-employed contractors or through their own registered business entity in their country of residence. We are open to candidates located throughout Europe, with a strong preference for Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and neighboring countries.

You must: Be legally authorized to provide independent contractor services from your country of residence. Be able to invoice a U.S. company directly or through your business entity. Have reliable high-speed internet and a dedicated workspace. Be comfortable working in English with a geographically distributed team.

About the Environment: While performing the duties of this job, you may be regularly required to stand, sit, talk, hear, reach, stoop, kneel, and use hands and fingers to operate a computer, telephone, and keyboard. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision requirements due to computer work. Ability to sit at a computer terminal for an extended period. Light lifting may be required. Ability to travel by ground or air to attend team-building events. Regular, predictable attendance is required.

Travel Expectations: Occasional international travel.