Ryan Bahan

About

---
name: ryan-bahan
description: Product engineer at Shopify, based in Denver. Use when you need someone who cares as much about the feel of a tool as the architecture under it. Happiest in the gap between a good idea and a shipped thing.
---

I love when something is so well-crafted that it becomes hard to imagine the world without it. Most of what I work on is about shortening the distance between a developer's intent and a shipped thing.

Outside Shopify, I tinker. Synth plugins in C++, small ML experiments on audio, anything that lets me poke at how a thing works at the layer below the one I usually live at. If you're building dev tools, agents, design systems, or anything audio-adjacent, I'd love to talk.

Selected work

• Shopify AI Toolkit

  Open-source integration that bridges Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI, and VS Code directly to Shopify's APIs, schemas, docs, and live store operations.

  TypeScriptPython

• Shopify CLI

  Contributor on Shopify's flagship open-source developer CLI (~700 stars) — the tool every external developer runs to scaffold, build, and deploy apps, themes, and storefronts on Shopify.

  TypeScriptNode

• Developer Dashboard

  End-to-end technical direction across backend and frontend for the daily working surface used by both internal Shopify teams and the external developer ecosystem. Introduced a modular hexagonal Rails engine architecture and built the design system the dashboard runs on.

  Rails EnginesDesign SystemsReact

Experience

1. Senior Software Engineer · Tech Lead, Developer Tools

   Shopify · Nov 2024 — Present

2. Senior Software Engineer, Developer Platform

   Shopify · 2022 — Nov 2024

3. Software Engineer, Developer Platform

   Shopify · 2020 — 2022

4. Freelance developer & creator

   Independent · 2017 — 2019

Tools

• TypeScript
• Preact / React
• Web Components
• Browser internals
• Design Systems
• Ruby on Rails
• Node.js
• GraphQL
• PostgreSQL
• ClickHouse
• GCP
• C++
• Python
• Developer Tooling
• CLI Design

Get in touch

ryan@ryanbahan.com

github.com/ryanbahan · linkedin.com/in/ryanbahan