“DJ is phenomenal. They find amazing candidates, make hiring extraordinary devs easy. Think of it as having a top recruiter, HR, and payroll departments in dozens of countries.”
Hire senior Elixir engineers with real production experience in Phoenix, LiveView, OTP, Ecto, Oban, and Absinthe. Headhunted from regions where serious BEAM talent is concentrated. Vetted by senior engineers, not recruiters. Placed full-time inside your team with reliable US time-zone overlap.
Andres
Recruitment Expert
Verified
Radu
Senior LiveView Product Engineer
Came from Ruby on Rails, transitioned to Elixir at a Bucharest fintech in 2020 building real-time trading dashboards. Led the Rails-to-Phoenix-LiveView migration of the firm’s customer-facing portal
David
Elixir/OTP Platform
Full-stack engineer who specialized into Elixir backends after working at a São Paulo SaaS scale-up. Strong Absinthe and GraphQL specialty
Marcos
Senior API / Absinthe Engineer
Marcos is a Absinthe + Ecto expert. He introduced Telemetry + OTel tracing; CI with property tests; zero-downtime releases on K8s.
Three things make Elixir hiring different from generalist hiring, and DistantJob’s model is set up for all three.
The senior Elixir engineers worth hiring are almost never on LinkedIn looking. They’re employed, often at companies that have specifically chosen Elixir because they want their senior engineers to stay.
Our recruiters have specific patches in the Elixir community across Latin America and Eastern Europe, engineers who answer their messages because they’ve placed a friend before.
Elixir is the language where this matters most. A non-technical recruiter cannot tell whether a candidate’s “OTP experience” is real or memorized. The difference between a senior who has actually designed supervision trees in production and one who has watched a Pragmatic Studios course only shows up under technical questioning.
Our technical rounds for Elixir candidates are run by senior engineers who have shipped Elixir to production. They run through real architectural scenarios, code review of deliberately flawed Phoenix/Ecto code, live problem-solving on supervision tree design. The candidates who clear this round are genuinely senior. The candidates who don’t never reach your shortlist.
The retention story matters specifically for Elixir teams because the cost of replacing a senior Elixir engineer is so high. Their context, your codebase, your supervision strategy, your Ecto patterns, your domain, all take 3–6 months to rebuild for someone else.
DistantJob places full-time dedicated engineers. Your developer, on your payroll (we handle the international employment machinery), in your Slack and standups, contributing to your codebase as a permanent team member. Not an agency contractor rotating across clients. Annual retention exceeds 95%, and every placement is backed by our Employee Lifetime Guarantee — if a developer ever doesn’t work out, we replace them at no additional cost, for as long as they’re on your team.
Testimonials
“DJ is phenomenal. They find amazing candidates, make hiring extraordinary devs easy. Think of it as having a top recruiter, HR, and payroll departments in dozens of countries.”
“DistantJob took the time to talk about the job description and explore what was important to us. They came back with a great candidate on the first try!”
“I can easily say that I’ve never worked with a more dedicated, patient, and productive developer. DistantJob made the remote engagement painless. Win-win!”
“We have 3 employees from DistantJob right now. Phenomenal. For the dollar value that we are spending, we are far ahead of what we would find locally or offshore.”
“Hiring through DistantJob (…) surpassed my expectations. I had no opinion before, neither for [remote work] or against, but this experience definitely put it on the radar for me.”
“DistantJob is great for helping you find technical folks especially when your local area doesn’t have the right pool of talent for the job.”
“The remote developers presented by DistantJob] delivered a caliber of quality, skill and technical expertise, beyond my best expectations, far exceeding our local team members.”
“Working with DistantJob made everything about recruiting a highly technical employee easier and cost-effective.”
As a leading remote IT recruitment agency, we care that our clients take part throughout the hiring process. Why? Because for us, hiring a qualified candidate is not only about the skills and abilities, but it’s also about how candidates match with your company’s culture.
As soon as you talk with us or fill our form, the first thing we do is analyze your company. We want to understand your culture and the type of people you value working with.
In 2 weeks, you’ll start reviewing people that match your requirements. We focus on providing you 3-5 top candidates instead of giving you an endless list.
Once you select the candidate, we handle all the contracts, NDA’s and payments from day 1.
We proactively source across our existing Elixir network in Latin America and Eastern Europe, plus targeted outreach to engineers identified through community signals (conference speakers, Elixir Forum contributors, library maintainers). Candidates are triaged on expertise match, salary band, US time-zone overlap, English fluency, and long-term availability.
A recruiter assesses spoken and written English, async communication discipline, motivation, and stability. We verify work history and decline candidates with serial short stints that suggest poor team fit. Approximately 60% of sourced candidates pass this stage.
A senior engineer (not a recruiter) runs a technical interview matched to the candidate’s claimed expertise.
For senior candidates, a 60–90 minute live session pairing on a real problem in a sandbox repo. We’re evaluating: code organization, test discipline, debugging approach under pressure, and how they think out loud about trade-offs.
We speak with past stakeholders and review code artifacts where possible. We confirm achievements, ownership level, and reliability in distributed teams.
Final alignment with the candidate on start date, hardware/security constraints, preferred collaboration tools, and any onboarding logistics. By the time we present a candidate to you, the operational details are already worked out.
Average time from intake to first candidate review: 14 days. Pass rate from sourced candidate to client shortlist: roughly 1 in 30.
| Option | Best for | What you actually get | Trade-offs |
|---|---|---|---|
| DistantJob (full-time placement) | Long-term ownership of Elixir capability inside your team | Senior Elixir engineer placed full-time on your payroll, US time-zone overlap, IP fully yours, international HR handled by us | Not designed for one-off projects |
| Niche Elixir job boards (HexHire, Elixir Forum jobs) | Companies with internal recruiting bandwidth | Real Elixir-focused candidate pool, lower cost per hire | You handle vetting, time-to-hire is typically 6–12 weeks |
| Generalist platforms (Toptal, Arc) | Short-term project work | Pre-vetted freelancers with Elixir on their profile | Quality varies, freelance model means shifting attention across projects, retention is structurally lower |
| Outsourcing/agencies | Managed projects with defined deliverables | Vendor delivers an outcome | Less control, vendor-owned process and IP, no individual relationship with the engineer |
| DIY job boards (LinkedIn, Stack Overflow) | Companies with significant in-house TA bandwidth | Large applicant pool | Slow, very low signal-to-noise for niche language hires, the senior engineers you actually want aren’t applying |
The honest answer is that DistantJob isn’t right for every scenario. If you need an Elixir contractor for 8 weeks of project work, a freelance platform is usually cheaper. What we do specifically is full-time placement: you get an Elixir engineer who becomes part of your team for years, not a vendor relationship that ends when the contract does.
Senior Elixir developer annual total cost typically ranges from $140,000–$220,000 in the US, $55,000–$110,000 in Eastern Europe (Poland, Portugal, Romania), and $55,000–$95,000 in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia). Through offshore hiring in those regions, you can typically save 40% compared to equivalent US hiring while maintaining quality.
Through DIY direct hiring (LinkedIn, GitHub outreach, job boards), expect 8–14 weeks from search start to first working day for a senior Elixir role, longer than for mainstream languages because the pool is thinner. Through DistantJob, typical time from intake call to interviewing 3–5 pre-vetted candidates is 14 days. Time to first working day is typically 4–6 weeks total including offer, contract, and onboarding.
Yes, the shortlists prioritize dependable overlap and strong async communication.
Yes: global contracts, NDA, payroll, benefits, and compliance are included.
A senior Elixir developer in 2026 should have production experience with Phoenix (1.7+) and LiveView (1.0+), fluency with OTP design (GenServer, Supervisors, Registry, DynamicSupervisor), strong Ecto skills including query optimization, comfort with Oban for background jobs, and at least one production deployment experience (Fly.io, Gigalixir, AWS, or Kubernetes with libcluster). They should also have testing maturity (ExUnit, Mox, ideally property-based tests with StreamData) and observability instincts (Telemetry, structured logging).
When you partner with DistantJob for your next hire, you get the highest quality developers who will deliver expert work on time. We headhunt developers globally; that means you can expect candidates within two weeks or less and at a great value.
Increase your development output within the next 30 days without sacrificing quality.
