Ian Jamieson

Swanky (Shopify Platinum Partner)

Lead technology strategy and delivery for a Shopify Platinum Partner agency serving global brands across retail, FMCG, sport, and entertainment. Own technical operations end to end, from discovery and architecture through engineering, integrations and product development, and built the engineering team that does it, doubled in size and much of it now at four years' tenure.

Act as the senior technical voice commercially, leading pre-sales engineering across 30+ opportunities in the last six months, managing partnerships with Vercel, Sanity, Patchworks and Shopify Professional Services, and running technical, AI and legal due diligence for a successful private equity transaction. Authored the company's AI strategy and its cyber security policy suite, which underpins the ISO27001 certification programme I am leading.

• —Built an agentic engineering harness for Hydrogen/Vercel builds: 24 skills across three plugins over version-pinned vendor primitives, guardrails enforced mechanically through hooks and CI, knowledge wired in over MCP, and a cross-client component registry with an AI content studio.
• —Built one of the earliest agentic knowledge systems in production, on vector databases and context injection (May 2023), 18 months before MCP standardised the pattern.
• —Built Swanky Noodle, an agentic DAG system: model, agent, script and connector nodes wired into a graph, triggered by webhook or cron, on Vercel Eve and AI Gateway.
• —Built Swanky Docs, an AI knowledge platform with AI-assisted drafting, MCP and vectorised repository documentation.
• —Shipped AI-powered locale translation tooling and an automated documentation pipeline.
• —Architected multi-store single-codebase Shopify builds, hybrid headless as a counter-narrative to full composable replatforms, Cloudflare O2O reverse proxies, and 3D/AR configurators in React Three Fiber.
• —Drove product development for "Eden", Swanky's productised Shopify theme and Theme Store candidate.
• —Authored the book "The CTO's Guide to Composable Commerce", supported by an industry event programme co-hosted in London with Shopify, Klaviyo, Sanity, and Dynamic Yield by Mastercard.

Design Bureau

Founded and directed a boutique digital consultancy specialising in bespoke software engineering. Oversaw production, strategy, client engagement, and operational management. Engaged with clients directly and through fractional contract roles, including the engagements below.

ShopCreatify (fractional contract via Design Bureau)

Guided technical strategy, architecture, and execution for high-value Shopify projects, balancing creative vision with robust engineering practices and commercial objectives.

Various clients (fractional contracts via Design Bureau)

Delivered bespoke applications and optimised user experiences across multiple industries. Provided full-stack development, UX design, and technical consulting.

Matchdeck

Led UI design and front-end engineering for a B2B intelligence platform while building production semantic search, graph database, and structured knowledge representation systems. Worked extensively with ontologies, semantic web technologies, entity resolution, and relationship modelling — foundational technologies that pre-date the current AI wave by a decade and now underpin modern agentic and retrieval-augmented systems.

• —Frontend Developer – Frontier Market Intelligence2011–2013
• —Creative Director – Global Africa Network2009–2011
• —Graphic Designer – Global Africa Network2008–2009
• —Lecturer – Concept Interactive2008
• —Graphic Designer – Freelance2007–2008