Senior Elixir Engineer

Summary

Join DockYard, a digital product consultancy, as a Senior Elixir Engineer to support existing systems. You will diagnose and resolve complex performance challenges in large-scale Elixir/Phoenix applications, collaborating with client teams. The ideal candidate possesses extensive Elixir and Phoenix experience, strong performance tuning skills, and excellent communication abilities. This contract role is remote, requiring availability during US Eastern Business Hours. Responsibilities include optimizing application performance, analyzing system communication patterns, and instrumenting applications with monitoring tools. The position requires proven experience shipping Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView applications and a strong understanding of application performance optimization.

Requirements

• Proven experience shipping Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView applications to production
• Strong understanding of application performance optimization, including async design, process architecture, and observability
• Experience using Telemetry, OpenTelemetry, or other tracing/monitoring tools
• Experience working with GraphQL or similar API technologies, and understanding their performance characteristics
• Comfort with distributed systems concepts
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Responsibilities

• Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks in Elixir/Phoenix applications, including network-level and application-level optimizations
• Analyze and improve system communication patterns (GraphQL, REST, distributed Elixir/Erlang) with a focus on async design and minimizing blocking operations
• Work independently and alongside client engineers and stakeholders to prioritize performance improvements
• Instrument applications with Telemetry, tracing, and observability tools to enable data-driven decision-making
• Contribute to project scoping, estimation, and planning, especially around refactoring and system-level improvements
• Participate actively in code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with Erlang tooling, like observer
• Frontend experience (HTML, JavaScript, Tailwind CSS)
• Prior client services, consulting, or freelancing experience
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools (Copilot, Cursor, etc.)