I track commerce roles - architect, VP, CTO, fractional, the whole altitude band - as an input to my own practice. Over the last few weeks about 950 of them came through the net. This is a filtered view, not a census: my sources lean Adobe Commerce and I weight toward architecture, so the raw counts are what my net caught, not the whole market. But a few things were loud enough to survive the bias, and one of them is worth acting on.

Composable ate the word “headless”

In this set, “composable” showed up more than ten times as often as “headless” - 281 mentions against 21. That is not an architecture shift. Headless and composable describe the same decoupling of the front end from the commerce engine. It is a positioning shift. The industry has changed the flag it flies over the same building.

That matters if you are the one being read. If your resume, your pitch deck, or your agency’s capabilities page still leads with “headless,” you are speaking a dialect the market quietly retired. Nobody will correct you. They will just pattern-match you as a half-step behind and move on.

Commerce hiring is an architecture conversation

The word “architect” appeared in more than half of the 950 roles. Director showed up a few hundred times, principal and head-of and VP well represented behind it. The IC developer role, the one that dominated commerce hiring for a decade, is not where the volume is anymore.

My read: platforms got easier to stand up and harder to get right. The commodity work - build the theme, wire the catalog, ship the checkout - is increasingly a solved problem or an offshore one. What companies cannot commoditize is the judgment about how the pieces fit, what to build versus buy, and which integration is going to be the thing that fails at scale. So they hire for altitude. They are buying decisions, not hands.

The best work is not on the board at all

Here is the finding I would actually do something with. Of those 950 postings, fewer than 2% mentioned “fractional.” One in five flagged remote.

Sit with that. The single most valuable engagement in senior commerce work - a fractional CTO who steadies a replatform, an architect who parachutes into a stalled integration for eight weeks - almost never appears as a job posting. Not because the demand isn’t there. Because that work isn’t a req you can write. You cannot put “someone who will tell us the truth about our architecture and has done this forty times” into a job description with a salary band. So it doesn’t get posted. It gets referred.

The job board, in other words, is a map of the work companies could define as a box. It is a comprehensive index of exactly the roles that need it least. The work that actually needs senior judgment is the part they couldn’t specify - and that part moves through relationships, reputation, and the occasional post like this one.

So two takeaways, depending on which side of the table you sit on.

If you are a company: the architect you need may not be a full-time hire, and you will not find them by posting one. The best version of that person is probably busy, probably fractional, and definitely not scrolling your careers page. You reach them by being reachable.

If you are senior talent: stop treating the job board as the market. It is the visible 20%. The other 80% is the work nobody wrote down, and you get to it the same way it gets to you - by being known for the judgment, not the tool.

I read these postings every week. The pattern doesn’t change much month to month, but the words do, and the gaps say more than the listings. I will keep writing down what the gaps are telling me.