Senior Backend Engineer (Elixir)

Remote from: EMEA
Salary, yearly, USD: 53,300 - 119,850
Department: Software Engineering
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 30 Jun 2026
Apply before: 30 Jul 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 89 / 15

About company

About Remote

Helping companies hire and pay global teams effortlessly.

Human Resources
2019

Actively Hiring

AI Summary

Remote is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (Elixir) to join cross-functional teams building global HR and payroll products. The role involves developing tools, APIs, and integrations with Elixir/Phoenix and Postgres, while leveraging automation and AI capabilities. You will have significant autonomy, deploy multiple times per day, and mentor other engineers. The position is fully remote, with a focus on solving complex challenges in global employment. Ideal candidates have strong engineering fundamentals, experience with AI/automation workflows, and proficiency in Elixir and Postgres.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight Requires strong engineering background, proven experience with AI/automation, and ability to mentor others, indicating a high level of expertise.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary range ($53,300-$119,850) is below the typical US market for senior backend engineers, which ranges from $100k to $180k. However, it may be competitive globally, especially considering Remote's fully remote culture and stock options.

Core Skills Required

Elixir Phoenix Postgres AWS CI/CD Kubernetes Docker React Automation AI

Cover Letter Sample

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am delighted to apply for the Senior Backend Engineer (Elixir) position at Remote. With a strong background in Elixir and Phoenix, I have built scalable systems that handle complex business logic. I am particularly drawn to Remote's mission of simplifying global employment and the opportunity to work on challenging integration problems.

In my previous role, I led the development of APIs that automated workflows, improving efficiency by 30%. I am fluent in AI and automation techniques, and I thrive in environments that value ownership and asynchronous collaboration. Remote's focus on innovation and autonomy aligns perfectly with my working style.

I am excited about the prospect of mentoring junior engineers and contributing to a diverse, global team. Thank you for considering my application. I look forward to the possibility of discussing how I can add value to Remote.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]

Sample Interview Questions

Describe your experience with Elixir and Phoenix. What were some challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

I have 4 years of experience with Elixir and Phoenix, building a real-time notification system. One challenge was handling high concurrency without bottlenecks. I used OTP gen servers to manage state and implemented backpressure to ensure system stability.

How have you designed or adopted automation or AI workflows in your previous projects?

I built an automated deployment pipeline using GitLab CI that included automated testing and canary releases. Additionally, I integrated an AI-based anomaly detection system to monitor production errors and trigger rollbacks automatically.

Explain your approach to mentoring junior engineers. Provide an example.

I pair with juniors on code reviews and hold weekly knowledge-sharing sessions. For instance, when a junior struggled with Ecto queries, I walked them through complex joins and indexing, resulting in a 50% performance improvement on their feature.

How do you ensure the reliability and scalability of a system you build?

I start with clear SLIs/SLOs, implement comprehensive monitoring, and use load testing to identify bottlenecks. For scalability, I design services to be horizontally scalable using message queues and stateless APIs. I also advocate for chaos engineering to test resilience.

Why are you interested in working at Remote, and how does your experience align with our mission?

I'm passionate about enabling global work, and Remote's platform directly addresses that challenge. My experience building distributed systems and cross-team collaboration fits perfectly with Remote's async culture. I also value the opportunity to work on products that have a real impact on people's lives.

About Remote

Remote is solving modern organizations’ biggest challenge – navigating global employment compliantly with ease. We make it possible for businesses of all sizes to recruit, pay, and manage international teams. With our core values at heart and future focused work culture, our team works tirelessly on ambitious problems, asynchronously, around the world. You can find Remoters working from 6 different continents (Antarctica left to go!) and all of our positions are fully remote.
With Innovation as one of the core values, we have built Automation and AI capabilities into the requirements for every role.
We encourage every member of the Remote team to bring their talents, experiences and culture to the table to help us build the best-in-class HR platform.

If you are energetic, curious, motivated and ambitious, be part of our world. Apply now and define the future of work!

The position

You’ll be joining a team of engineers across Frontend, Backend, SRE and QA. We’re organised into cross-functional development teams assigned to specific verticals.

This role is open for several teams, and we will define the exact team that you will be joining during the interview process based on the business needs and your preferences.

Regardless of the specific team, you will be working on building tools, APIs and integrations for one of our products.

Our backend is built with Elixir and Phoenix, with a Postgres database. We use React and Nextjs for our front-end. Gitlab is used as a version control tool, issue tracker and a CI/CD solution. Our applications are hosted on AWS. We fully rely on our CI for deployments and deploy multiple times per day.
You can also check out this Keynote to learn how we evolved Remote’s architecture and organisation to support a fast pace. We explore domain boundaries and dependency management alongside worker separation. You will also hear about ownership driven observability.

What this job can offer you

Complex and meaningful challenges — solving them will enable people and businesses to live and operate in any country of the world.
Opportunity to have a significant impact on the business — we are still very early in our journey as a company, and each change you make today is amplified by the company’s growth.
A lot of freedom to organize your work and life — you are not bound to daily standups, recurring meetings or other ceremonies.
Competitive salary, stock options, flexible paid time off, and a set of perks and benefits.
A supportive and kind work environment where we would like you to challenge the dogmas and pursue innovation!
Strong team of experienced engineers who will support and facilitate your professional growth.

What you bring

Must have (professional experience):

Strong engineering fundamentals and a track record of shipping production systems that are secure, reliable, and scalable.
Practical experience designing or adopting agentic/automation workflows (or comparable systems) and improving them through iteration.
Ability to think in systems: define specs clearly, break down plans, instrument verification, and close the loop on quality.
Postgres (or similar).
CI/CD (GitLab, Github, Jenkins or similar).
Demonstrates strong automation and AI capabilities and AI fluency.

Nice to have

Kubernetes
Docker
AWS
Nextjs
React/Vue/Angular

Key Responsibilities

Lead the development of major team-scoped projects, participate in cross-team initiatives for Remote’s HR and Payroll products.
Actively participate in product work in the team: provide feedback, suggest solutions to the problems. Use technical insights and expertise to suggest product improvements.
Maintain good understanding of the team’s domain, both from product and engineering sides.
Provide feedback on code reviews.
Contribute to the shared codebase.
Debug and solve technical and business issues.
Participate in non-team activities, such as support rotations, hiring process, RFC discussions, etc.
Mentor and provide guidance to other engineers.
Investigate, propose and participate in implementation of improvements to our platform.
Implement interfaces with performance, accessibility, and API design in mind.
Redesign how engineering work ships with autonomous agents as the default execution layer
Propose and operationalize agentic workflows end-to-end (spec → plan → execute → verify) to deliver outcomes faster.
Build reusable agentic workflows and primitives in the codebase so teams can apply them repeatedly across domains.
Use verification loops (tests, checks, evals, guardrails) to ensure results are correct, secure, reliable, and scalable.

Practicals

Reporting line: Engineering Team Leader
Team: Engineering
Location: Anywhere in the World
Start date: As soon as possible

Application process

Interview with our recruiter
Interview with an Engineering Leader
(async) Code exercise and review
Interview with members of the engineering team
Bar Raiser Interview
Executive Interview with VP of Engineering
Offer and Prior employment verification check

Remote’s Total Rewards philosophy is to ensure fair, unbiased compensation and fair equity pay along with competitive benefits in all locations in which we operate. We do not agree to or encourage cheap-labor practices and therefore we ensure to pay above in-location rates. We hope to inspire other companies to support global talent-hiring and bring local wealth to developing countries.

At first glance our salary bands seem quite wide – here is some context. At Remote we have international operations and a globally distributed workforce. We use geo ranges to consider geographic pay differentials as part of our global compensation strategy to remain competitive in various markets while we hiring globally.
Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location, and our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay for the successful candidate in this role is dependent upon many factors such as location, transferable or job-related skills, work experience, relevant training, business needs, and market demands. The base salary range may be subject to change.
At Remote, we foster internal mobility as a key element of our culture of employee growth and development, supported by a compensation philosophy that guarantees pay equity and fairness. Therefore, all compensation changes associated with an internal move will be reviewed by the Total Rewards & People Enablement team on a case by case basis.

The annual salary range for this full-time position is

$53,300—$119,850 USD

Benefits

Our full benefits & perks are explained in our handbook at remote.com/r/benefits. As a global company, each country works differently, but some benefits/perks are for all Remoters:

work from anywhere
flexible paid time off
flexible working hours (we are async)
16 weeks paid parental leave
mental health support services
stock options
learning budget
home office budget & IT equipment
budget for local in-person social events or co-working spaces

How you’ll plan your day (and life)

We work async at Remote which means you can plan your schedule around your life (and not around meetings). Read more at remote.com/async.

You will be empowered to take ownership and be proactive. When in doubt you will default to action instead of waiting. Your life-work balance is important and you will be encouraged to put yourself and your family first, and fit work around your needs.

If that sounds like something you want, apply now!

How to apply

Please fill out the form below and upload your CV with a PDF format.
We kindly ask you to submit your application and CV in English, as this is the standardised language we use here at Remote.
If you don’t have an up to date CV but you are still interested in talking to us, please feel free to add a copy of your LinkedIn profile instead.

Not only do we encourage folks from all ethnic groups, genders, sexuality, age, abilities, disability status and any other under-represented group to apply, but we prioritize a sense of belonging. We have 4 ERGs (Women, Disability, Queer, Minorities in Tech) who meet regularly with the People team. During your interviews and beyond, we ask & encourage anybody who needs an accommodation to request one from their recruiter.

We will ask you to voluntarily tell us your pronouns at interview stage, and you will have the option to answer our anonymous demographic questionnaire when you apply below. As an equal employment opportunity employer it’s important to us that our workforce reflects people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences and this data will help us to stay accountable. We thank you for providing this data, if you chose to.

At Remote, we embrace AI as a valuable tool while prioritizing human creativity and authenticity. We look forward to meeting candidates who balance innovation with genuine expertise and experience. To learn more about Remote’s AI guidelines check see here.
Please note we accept applications on an ongoing basis.

Apply now >