Hire senior Elixir developers for real-time, fault-tolerant apps
Senior Elixir engineers who build Phoenix and LiveView products and resilient OTP systems inside your repos, working during your business day.
By the Ryz Labs team · Updated October 2026
Hiring Elixir developers through Ryz gets you senior engineers who design with processes and supervision trees, not just Phoenix controllers. They are in the top 1% of the engineers we interview, they join your team and codebase, and they work within an hour of US time zones.
What our Elixir developers work on
Companies choose Elixir for concurrency, real-time features and systems that stay up. Our engineers work with Phoenix, LiveView, Ecto, Oban, Broadway, Absinthe and Nx on the BEAM, usually alongside Postgres, Redis and Kafka or RabbitMQ. Typical projects:
- Phoenix web applications and JSON or GraphQL APIs with Ecto and Postgres.
- Interactive interfaces built with LiveView, so product teams ship rich UI without a separate front-end stack.
- Real-time features: chat, presence, notifications and collaborative editing over Phoenix Channels and PubSub.
- Background processing with Oban and data ingestion pipelines with Broadway and GenStage.
- Distributed systems on OTP that handle many concurrent connections, such as IoT backends and messaging platforms.
- Machine learning inference in Elixir with Nx, Bumblebee and Axon, or calls to external model APIs.
Skills we vet for
- OTP design. GenServer, Supervisor strategies, Registry and DynamicSupervisor, and when a plain function beats a process.
- The BEAM runtime. Lightweight processes, message passing, mailboxes, preemptive scheduling and garbage collection per process.
- Phoenix and LiveView. Contexts, plugs, LiveView lifecycle, assigns and streams, and keeping socket state lean.
- Ecto. Changesets, multi-step transactions with Ecto.Multi, preloading, and writing efficient queries.
- Fault tolerance. "Let it crash" applied sensibly, restart intensity, and isolating failures between parts of the system.
- Distribution. Clustering with libcluster, distributed PubSub, and the trade-offs of global state across nodes.
- Testing. ExUnit, async tests with the Ecto sandbox, Mox for behaviors, and property-based tests with StreamData.
- Operations. Releases, runtime configuration, telemetry and observability with Observer, LiveDashboard and OpenTelemetry.
How we vet Elixir developers
Recruiters source Elixir engineers with production systems behind them, often people who came from Ruby, Erlang or Go, and check what they shipped. ARC, our in-house system, ranks the pipeline. Candidates complete a structured NTRVSTA AI interview focused on OTP, Phoenix and concurrency reasoning. Recruiters review each candidate before and after the interview and assemble a curated shortlist for you. AI scores are advisory. People make the final decisions.
Sample interview topics
- A single GenServer has become a bottleneck because every request goes through it. How do you spot this, and what are your options for spreading the load?
- A LiveView page uses more memory per user each week. What in the socket assigns could be growing, and how would streams or temporary assigns help?
- Explain the difference between one_for_one, one_for_all and rest_for_one supervision, with an example where the choice matters.
- An Oban job sends an email and updates a record, and sometimes customers get two emails. How do you make it safe to retry?
- When a node in your cluster loses its network connection, what happens to processes registered globally, and how do you design around it?
Ways to hire Elixir developers
| Option | Best for | Trade-offs |
|---|
| Freelance marketplace | Short Phoenix tasks or a quick prototype | The Elixir freelance pool is thin. OTP design quality is hard to judge from a profile. |
| Staffing or recruiting agency | Broad backend hiring | Many agencies have few Elixir candidates and limited ability to test OTP depth. |
| In-house recruiting | Long-term owners of your Elixir platform | A niche language means long searches, or training engineers from other languages. |
| Ryz Labs staff augmentation | Adding senior Elixir engineers to an existing product team | You lead priorities and code review. Best when your Elixir codebase is already running. |
| Ryz Labs dedicated team | A new Elixir service or real-time product built by one team | A tech lead plus engineers, scoped together. Starts with a plan before work begins. |
Ryz is not the right fit if you want hourly freelance help booked through a self-serve platform, or if you need engineers in European or Asian time zones. If you want engineers on your own payroll, an employer-of-record partner is the better fit.
Why hire Elixir developers from Latin America
Elixir has unusually deep roots in Latin America. The language was created by a Brazilian engineer, and Brazil and its neighbors have hosted active Elixir meetups and conferences for years. That makes the region one of the better places to find experienced Elixir engineers rather than people converting from another language mid-project.
Real-time products tend to surface problems while users are online. Our Elixir developers work within an hour of US time zones, so they can watch a launch with you, read the telemetry and push a fix during the same session. They work in English and join your existing standups and channels.
Related roles
FAQ
Can your Elixir developers work on our front end too?
Many build full features in LiveView, so they handle the interface as well as the server. If your front end is a separate React app, we can match someone with experience on both sides.
We are moving from Ruby on Rails to Elixir. Can you help?
Yes. Several of our Elixir engineers came from Rails and have run gradual migrations, moving one service or feature at a time.
How much does it cost to hire Elixir developers?
Custom quote, scoped per team. You receive a plan, a price and the names of the engineers before you sign.
Who holds the contract, and what hours do they keep?
You sign one contract with Ryz. Our engineers work with us as independent contractors, and we handle paying them. They keep hours within an hour of US time zones.
Questions we didn't answer? Email info@ryzlabs.com.