Senior Elixir Engineer Contract

Senior Elixir Engineer

DockYard is a digital product consultancy specializing in production-ready apps.
DockYard offers a range of consulting services, including product planning, design, user experience (UX), full-stack engineering, and QA.
Over the last decade, the company has solved complex product challenges for visionary brands like Netflix, Apple, Nasdaq, and Harvard.

DockYard is seeking a Senior Elixir Engineer with extensive experience in Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView to help build and evolve backend services and operational tooling for a high-traffic, integration-heavy digital product delivered via a phased approach.

In this role, you will design and implement clean APIs, durable data models, and secure authentication patterns, and you will build a web-based admin portal in Phoenix LiveView that enables non-technical teams to manage content, communications, and operational updates without engineering involvement.

The ideal candidate is pragmatic and product-minded:
comfortable owning backend features end-to-end, proactive about integration risk, and effective at balancing delivery speed with maintainability and secure-by-default engineering practices.
Responsibilities
• Build and maintain backend services in Elixir/Phoenix, including API design, data modeling, and integration patterns for an integration-heavy product.
• Develop and extend a Phoenix LiveView admin portal that enables non-technical teams to manage content, communications, and operational workflows.
• Partner closely with the React Native mobile team to design, version, and ship JSON-based APIs that are reliable and ergonomic for mobile use (clear contracts, pagination/filtering patterns, backward compatibility, and predictable error responses).
• Design secure authentication/authorization patterns (RBAC, audit logging, safe admin operations) and ensure data is handled securely end-to-end.
• Implement and maintain third-party integrations (REST/GraphQL as applicable), including robust error handling, retries, idempotency, and clear operational visibility.
• Instrument services for observability (logs/metrics/tracing) and use production signals to drive reliability and performance improvements.
• Collaborate with the Tech Lead and stakeholders to refine requirements, contribute to scoping/estimation, and deliver work in a phased plan.
• Participate in code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing; help establish and reinforce backend engineering standards.
Must Haves
• Proven experience shipping Elixir/Phoenix applications to production, including meaningful ownership of backend features.
• Strong experience with Phoenix LiveView (the admin portal will be built in LiveView) and comfort building server-rendered interactive UIs.
• Strong API design fundamentals for mobile clients:
auth, versioning/backward compatibility, rate limiting, retries/idempotency, and well-structured error handling.
• Experience with relational data modeling (e.g., Postgres), background jobs/queues, and operationally safe migrations.
• Practical experience with observability tooling (Telemetry, OpenTelemetry, tracing/monitoring, structured logging).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable collaborating in a client-facing environment.
Nice to Haves
• Experience collaborating with mobile teams (React Native or native) on API contracts, performance, and offline/poor-network behaviors.
• Experience with distributed systems patterns and fault-tolerant design in Elixir/Erlang environments.
• Familiarity with admin UX patterns and building "safe by default" internal tools (audit trails, approvals, permissioning).
• Frontend comfort for LiveView (HTML, CSS, Tailwind).
• Prior consulting/freelance experience.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot).
Employment Type
• Contract (Up to 40 hours/week)
Location

US Remote (must be able to work Eastern Business Hours)

Even if you don't feel you're a 100% fit, we'd still love to hear from you!

DockYard is an equal opportunity employer.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against based on race, color, religion, national origin, veteran status, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, political affiliation, personal appearance, pregnancy, family responsibilities, matriculation, or any other characteristic protected under federal, state, or local law.

This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship.