{"id":1419609,"url":"https://alion.io/job/vaan-solutions-strategist","title":"Solutions Strategist","company":{"id":1849757,"name":"VAAN®","domain":"vaangroup.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/vaangroup","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":null},"role":"Design","role_family":"Design","seniority":null,"employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_regions","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["AR","BR","MX","AG","AW","BS","BB","BZ","BM","BO","VG","BQ","KY","CL","CR","CW","DM","DO","EC","SV","FK","GF","GD","GP","GT","GY","HT","HN","JM","MQ","MS","NI","PA","PY","PE","PR","KN","LC","PM","SX"],"hiring_countries_total":45,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"FigJam","optional":false},{"name":"Figma","optional":false},{"name":"Jira","optional":false},{"name":"Magento","optional":false},{"name":"PHP","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-16T13:24:08Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T11:27:21Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":15,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":15},"description":"Vaan is a Shopify Platinum design & technology agency and the home of Brand Conversion Design.\nWe migrate, design, and build high performing eCommerce experiences leveraging our Brand Conversion Design framework, industry partnerships & deep eCommerce technical expertise. Solving the tension between optimization and design, we help brands make the most of their eCommerce.\nAbout the role\nVaan partners with direct-to-consumer and B2B brands from $5M to $1B in GMV, across new builds, platform migrations, and ongoing optimization retainers. Our work spans development, design, A/B testing, and strategic roadmapping in one of the fastest-moving platform environments in commerce.\nThe Solutions Strategist sits between client understanding and technical execution. This is not a developer role and does not require one. It requires someone who can walk into a complex merchant environment, understand how systems connect, identify friction, and turn that into a requirements picture engineering and design can build against.\nWe value specificity over generalism, forward-thinking over comfort with the status quo, and partners over vendors.\nResponsibilities\nLead technical discovery for new engagements, migrations, and major projects, surfacing the requirements others miss\nRun structured sessions with client stakeholders across technical, marketing, and ops functions, and turn what surfaces into documentation the full team can act on\nTranslate ambiguous business needs into scoped functional and technical requirements, including an explicit account of what is out of scope and why\nDecompose requirements into epics and stories an engineer can pick up without a follow-up conversation, working alongside the Product Owner to keep the backlog accurate as the engagement moves\nMaintain the requirements record page by page and section by section, covering features and functions, metafields, and the apps in play, with every line traceable to scope\nWork with Tech Leads to document architecture, data flows, and business rules, and to validate feasibility and scope before requirements become commitments\nBuild and maintain the discovery frameworks and templates the rest of the team works from\nTranslate what a client asks for into what they actually need, then identify the tool that serves it, with reasoning legible to the client, engineering, and the account team\nMaintain working awareness of what is already implemented across our portfolio, so recommendations build on existing stack decisions instead of duplicating or contradicting them\nEvaluate third-party tools across loyalty, search, reviews, personalization, subscriptions, and headless commerce, knowing each category well enough to ask the right questions and judge honestly\nRecognize when someone else on the team knows a tool better than you, and pull them in early\nTrack Shopify platform updates, deprecations, and roadmap signals, and translate what changes into client guidance\nAdvise on stack composition with a focus on long-term maintainability, scalability, and cost\nMap complex client environments across ERPs, PIMs, OMS platforms, CRM systems, and marketing stacks, including how they connect and where Shopify fits\nIdentify integration requirements, data flows, and failure points before they become project risks\nAudit existing Shopify implementations for technical debt, architectural gaps, and unused platform capability, and articulate what should change and why\nUnderstand how AI works inside the apps our clients already run. Most of the ecosystem is adding AI features across search, merchandising, personalization, support, and retention. The question is never whether the feature exists. It is whether turning it on moves a business objective this client actually has\nHold a working read on where AI creates genuine value in ecommerce and where it is noise, and be able to explain the difference to a client without hedging\nIdentify where AI-enabled tooling could improve conversion, retention, or operational efficiency for a client, and build the case\nUse AI in your own delivery work: drafting specs, scripting audits, analyzing rulesets, reconciling data, roughing out wireframes to move a conversation along\nWork as a peer to Growth Strategists. You are the reason a commercially attractive roadmap item is deliverable, or the reason it gets reshaped before it is promised to a client\nContribute technical context to scoping and estimation that makes the numbers more accurate\nKeep engineering, design, and the account team working from the same requirements picture, and surface the conflict early when they are not\nQualifications\nA track record of picking the right tool for a specific client context and being able to defend the choice to both the client and the engineers who have to live with it\nWorking familiarity with Shopify Plus across admin, metafields, theme architecture, and B2B, enough to reason about what is possible without needing to build it\nUnderstanding of headless and composable architectures, and of when they are the wrong call\nComfort saying you do not know a tool well, and a habit of finding the person who does\nA track record of leading discovery on complex digital projects, with documentation habits that survive contact with a deadline\nAbility to run stakeholder sessions that surface the real requirements, meaning what clients actually need rather than what they say they want\nExperience writing requirements engineering can execute against with minimal ambiguity, and breaking them down to a granularity a developer can pick up\nExperience holding requirements for several clients at once without context bleeding between them\nExposure to platform migration from Magento, BigCommerce, or Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify Plus\nWorking comfort in Figma or FigJam, Jira, and Excel. You don't need mastery. You should be able to run a session on a canvas, author a story, and keep a structured requirements sheet clean\nExperience evaluating AI features inside tools a merchant already pays for, rather than only standalone AI products, and judging whether switching one on is worth the change\nComfort with rapid change. You update your position when the evidence warrants it, and you say so out loud\nConfident in client-facing environments, able to ask hard questions diplomatically and explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders\nAble to propose a compromise a client will accept, an engineer will respect, and the account team can still deliver inside the SOW\nStrong written communication. Your requirements documents, briefs, and follow-ups are clear and trusted by the people who use them","description_format":"text","description_chars":6637,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Argentina","iso":"AR","kind":"region"},{"name":"Brazil","iso":"BR","kind":"region"},{"name":"Colombia","iso":null,"kind":"region"},{"name":"Mexico","iso":"MX","kind":"region"},{"name":"Anguilla","iso":null,"kind":"region"},{"name":"Antigua and Barbuda","iso":"AG","kind":"region"},{"name":"Aruba","iso":"AW","kind":"region"},{"name":"Bahamas","iso":"BS","kind":"region"},{"name":"Barbados","iso":"BB","kind":"region"},{"name":"Belize","iso":"BZ","kind":"region"},{"name":"Bermuda","iso":"BM","kind":"region"},{"name":"Bolivia","iso":"BO","kind":"region"},{"name":"British Virgin Islands","iso":"VG","kind":"region"},{"name":"Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba","iso":"BQ","kind":"region"},{"name":"Cayman Islands","iso":"KY","kind":"region"},{"name":"Chile","iso":"CL","kind":"region"},{"name":"Costa Rica","iso":"CR","kind":"region"},{"name":"Curaçao","iso":"CW","kind":"region"},{"name":"Dominica","iso":"DM","kind":"region"},{"name":"Dominican Republic","iso":"DO","kind":"region"},{"name":"Ecuador","iso":"EC","kind":"region"},{"name":"El Salvador","iso":"SV","kind":"region"},{"name":"Falkland Islands","iso":"FK","kind":"region"},{"name":"French Guiana","iso":"GF","kind":"region"},{"name":"Grenada","iso":"GD","kind":"region"},{"name":"Guadeloupe","iso":"GP","kind":"region"},{"name":"Guatemala","iso":"GT","kind":"region"},{"name":"Guyana","iso":"GY","kind":"region"},{"name":"Haiti","iso":"HT","kind":"region"},{"name":"Honduras","iso":"HN","kind":"region"},{"name":"Jamaica","iso":"JM","kind":"region"},{"name":"Martinique","iso":"MQ","kind":"region"},{"name":"Montserrat","iso":"MS","kind":"region"},{"name":"Nicaragua","iso":"NI","kind":"region"},{"name":"Panama","iso":"PA","kind":"region"},{"name":"Paraguay","iso":"PY","kind":"region"},{"name":"Peru","iso":"PE","kind":"region"},{"name":"Puerto Rico","iso":"PR","kind":"region"},{"name":"Saint Kitts and Nevis","iso":"KN","kind":"region"},{"name":"Saint Lucia","iso":"LC","kind":"region"},{"name":"Saint Vincent and the Grenadines","iso":null,"kind":"region"},{"name":"Saint-Pierre and Miquelon","iso":"PM","kind":"region"},{"name":"Sint Maarten","iso":"SX","kind":"region"},{"name":"Suriname","iso":"SR","kind":"region"},{"name":"Trinidad and Tobago","iso":"TT","kind":"region"},{"name":"Turks and Caicos Islands","iso":"TC","kind":"region"},{"name":"Uruguay","iso":"UY","kind":"region"},{"name":"United States Virgin Islands","iso":"VI","kind":"region"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Commerce","Design & Creative","Digital Design"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-28T21:53:36Z"}],"liveness":{"score":65,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.721,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":14,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:25","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/vaan-solutions-strategist","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/vaan-solutions-strategist.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T21:29:22Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4142,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":858,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}