Senior Backend Engineer (Elixir)

📋 Description

• • Architect and scale the core services that power Remote’s global payroll, benefits, and compliance platform, serving thousands of companies and tens of thousands of employees across 75+ countries.
• • Own the full lifecycle of Elixir services—from green-field design and RFCs to deployment, monitoring, and iterative optimization—ensuring 99.9 % uptime for mission-critical financial and HR workflows.
• • Lead cross-functional pods with Product, Data, Security, and DevOps to translate complex international regulations into elegant, auditable code that automates tax calculations, statutory filings, and multi-currency payouts.
• • Design event-driven systems using Phoenix, Broadway, and GenStage that process millions of payroll events per month with exactly-once semantics, leveraging Postgres, DynamoDB, and Redis for consistency at scale.
• • Champion best practices: write clean, test-driven Elixir (ExUnit, StreamData), enforce code-review standards, and mentor mid-level engineers through pair programming and architecture guilds.
• • Continuously improve observability—set SLIs/SLOs, build Grafana dashboards, and tune distributed tracing so the team detects anomalies before customers do.
• • Optimize performance bottlenecks via BEAM telemetry, write custom Ecto query planners, and benchmark hot paths to keep p99 latency under 200 ms for synchronous endpoints.
• • Collaborate with Security to implement zero-trust patterns, encrypt PII at rest, and run quarterly red-team drills to satisfy SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR requirements.
• • Contribute to Remote’s open-source initiatives—upstream patches to Elixir libraries, publish blog posts on distributed systems, and speak at BEAM-focused conferences to grow the community.
• • Influence product strategy by translating customer pain points into technical roadmaps, estimating effort with story-pointing, and delivering incremental value every two weeks.
• • Foster a remote-first culture across time zones: run inclusive stand-ups, document decisions in Notion, and record Loom demos so teammates in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas stay aligned.
• • Experiment boldly: prototype new features in LiveView, spike GraphQL subscriptions for real-time payslip updates, and A/B test rollout strategies behind feature flags.
• • Ensure compliance and auditability by building immutable ledgers, time-stamped change logs, and automated reconciliation jobs that satisfy Big-4 auditors and local tax authorities.
• • Drive cost efficiency by rightsizing Kubernetes clusters, adopting spot instances, and writing autoscaling policies that cut cloud spend without sacrificing reliability.
• • Celebrate wins: ship a major release, share post-mortems, and recognize teammates in our #kudos Slack channel—because at Remote, every line of code helps unlock global employment opportunities.