Two flavors of Adobe Commerce developers: backend and frontend. But the distinction is sharper than just back-end versus front-end — it’s about the specific skill stacks each side requires.
Backend developers
The Magento backend runs on the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache (often Nginx instead), MySQL (or MariaDB / Percona), and PHP. But Magento is not as simple as PHP:
- EAV — Entity-Attribute-Value data model.
- MVC — Model-View-Controller design pattern.
- Magento APIs — REST or SOAP.
- Built on the Zend 2 framework, not raw PHP.
Backend specialties typically focus on integration work, custom extensions, and data migrations.
Frontend developers
The frontend stack varies by approach:
- Traditional theming — JavaScript, CSS, HTML, PHTML, Knockout.js.
- Pure headless (EXO and others) — React, GraphQL, modern JS tooling.
Beyond the storefront
Developers can enhance not only the customer-facing storefronts, but also the admin portal (the Magento backend itself). Many enterprise deployments invest as much in admin UX as they do in customer UX — merchandisers, marketers, and CSRs spend hours per day in the admin, and small UX wins compound.
Full-stack reality
Many small-to-mid-size projects benefit from full-stack developers who can move between frontend and backend. Larger projects increasingly rely on specialists. The right team composition depends on project size, complexity, and architectural approach (monolithic theming vs. pure headless).
Adapted from the Adobe Commerce Primer, slide 34. Last reviewed May 2026.