Rare Beauty Brands is a fast-growing portfolio of innovative beauty and skincare brands, including Kate Somerville and Patchology. We combine the agility of a startup with the discipline of a performance-driven organization, scaling brands that inspire confidence, deliver results, and consistently outperform their categories. Our teams move quickly, test boldly, and operate with a deep commitment to data, creativity, and collaboration.
Kate Somerville is seeking a fractional Shopify expert to serve as the hands-on technical owner of our DTC ecommerce platform for a focused six-month period. The one qualification we won't trade away is deep, real Shopify mastery: someone who already lives inside Liquid, metafields, metaobjects, and a heavily customized, multi-layered theme, and doesn't need ramp-up time to learn the backend.
Strategic thinking is genuinely welcome here, not just tolerated. If this person sees a smarter merchandising approach or a better way to sequence a promotion, we want to hear it. But we're not hiring for strategy first and hoping the technical skill follows; we're hiring for technical mastery first, and strategic instinct is the bonus round.
The six-month window is intentional. Kate Somerville is in the middle of shaping a broader connected commerce strategy (spanning loyalty, personalization, subscription, and marketplace), and this engagement is structured to stabilize and improve the current Shopify environment while that longer-term architecture is decided. A strong fit here could extend or evolve as that roadmap solidifies.
The Mindset We're Hiring For
Every hire on this team gets measured against one trait first: does this person find a way to win? We're looking for builders and tinkerers, not people who wait for the perfect brief. Specifically, that means:
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Resourceful by default. When the obvious path is blocked, this person finds another one instead of reporting the blocker and waiting.
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Comfortable inside the guts of a system. A messy theme, a stubborn metafield, or an undocumented app is a puzzle worth digging into, not a reason to punt.
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Bias toward “shipping”. This person would rather launch a version and learn from real data than polish a plan that never meets a customer.
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Treats “there's no way to do this in Shopify” as a starting point for investigation, not a final answer.
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Wants to know whether their work moved the needle and pushes to get it live quickly enough to find out.
What You'll Own
Shopify Theme & Technical Execution
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Work directly inside a custom, layered Shopify theme (Liquid, JS, CSS, JSON templates) to build, troubleshoot, and improve site functionality.
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Diagnose and resolve product display, metafield, and schema issues (e.g., bundle/PDP configuration conflicts) quickly and independently.
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Build and QA promotional mechanics: GWP setups, BOGO logic, discount configuration, and landing pages, ahead of key promotional windows.
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Manage the app ecosystem: install, configure, troubleshoot, and evaluate Shopify apps, and flag conflicts before they hit the live site.
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Maintain clean documentation and SOPs so the theme and its logic are legible to the next person, not just to you.
Partnership with Brand & Digital Leadership
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Work closely with the EVP of Brand & Digital to shape and sequence technical priorities, bringing your own point of view on what should happen and how.
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Flag technical constraints, trade-offs, and platform risks early and in plain language, so decisions can be made quickly.
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Support promotional and launch calendars with reliable, on-time technical delivery.
Connected Commerce Input
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Serve as a technical sounding board for the connected commerce strategy development (loyalty, personalization, subscription, data unification).
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Flag where the current Shopify setup will help or hinder that direction, and where technical debt should be addressed now versus later.
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Provide informed input on platform, app, and integration choices without owning the strategic roadmap itself.
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Deep, demonstrable expertise in Shopify Liquid theme development — comfortable inside complex, heavily customized or multi-layered themes, not just out-of-the-box builds.
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Strong working knowledge of Shopify APIs, metafields, apps, and the Shopify Plus feature set.
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5+ years of hands-on, technical ecommerce execution (not primarily strategy or account management).
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Proven ability to own execution independently in a fast-moving DTC environment with minimal oversight.
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Clear communicator who can explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders without over-explaining.
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Comfortable in a fractional or contract structure, managing priorities across a defined scope of work.
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A track record of finding a way around a blocker rather than stopping at it, and a preference for shipping and testing over endless planning.
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Beauty, skincare, or consumer products experience.
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Experience with subscription platforms (e.g., Ordergroove or similar) or replatforming a subscription program.
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Familiarity with connected commerce concepts: loyalty, personalization, and customer data unification.
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Based in the Los Angeles area.
This is a 3-6 month fractional or contract engagement, structured around scope rather than a fixed weekly hour count. Cadence and time commitment will flex based on the promotional calendar and project load and can be discussed directly with candidates who are the right technical fit. Extension beyond six months is possible. Los Angeles area preferred.
