Lead Software Engineer - Elixir (Remote)

Dscout is a flexible Experience Research Platform for capturing in-context insights from high-quality participants, bridging the gap between product teams and users. Leading brands like Sonos, Spotify, Duolingo and Best Buy use Dscout to test ideas, iterate quickly, collaborate, and build confidently. We are expanding our smart and driven team and would love for you to join us.

We’re looking for a smart, creative, and driven Lead Software Engineer - Elixir to build great software with us. You have experience creating and launching new products and tackling some technical aspects (performance, scalability, DevOps, etc) and you are eager to keep learning and growing. You love to write code and strive to make it better with each commit. You're familiar with SaaS-focused modern backends, API development, SQL, and don't mind doing an occasional frontend task either. You are hands-on, self-directed, and feel at home in a fast-paced, collaborative, and agile environment.

Our team is growing but we’re not a big company. We work collaboratively, move fast (we deploy to production many times a day), and value technical quality. If you are excited about the challenge of building an incredible product while working alongside a great engineering team, we’d love to hear from you!

Our Platform:

Our web platform is built on React.js frontend and Elixir backend tied together by GraphQL APIs. We make heavy use of PostgreSQL for our storage needs and we host our platform on AWS. Another core part of our offering are two mobile apps - iOS and Android - that are written in Swift and Kotlin respectively. We also employ WebRTC and WebSockets for live video streaming and use GPT-4 & Python for NLP and media processing.

Over ten years and 57K commits later, we've maintained a tidy code base that is well documented and battle-tested by tens of thousands of users.

And a few more tech details and challenges we deal with on our backend specifically:

• Our platform relies on a mature GraphQL API built on Absinthe
• We are a video heavy platform with complex video processing and property based testing for verification (we combine multiple video streams, including screenshares, and we do picture-in-picture generation)
• dscout Live, our realtime video interview product, utilizes WebRTC and supports multiple participants
• Research survey design involves skip and knockout logic and we verify question flow using graph traversal approach
• Exporting gigabytes of video data can be a challenge and we use streaming archive generation for that
• We use collaborative workspaces through Phoenix channels and presence
• We make heavy use of background job workflows to compose media processing, for ML models, payments, data ingestion, etc and we rely on Oban for the heavy lifting




Working Hours

• Standard Hours: 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM CT
• While working these core hours is expected in this role, we know that from time-to-time life happens and we can be flexible to meet your needs.

What you will do:

• Be an active member of a cross-functional product development team that frequently interfaces with business stakeholders
• Communicate and drive improvement within and across teams as well as mentor other engineers
• Focus on the backend and welcome a bit of full stack work
• Be responsible for the technical quality of the team's product
• Develop customer facing applications in a fast-paced agile environment
• Work closely with the design team to deliver user-friendly and modern products
• Apply DevOps mindset to improve the Continuous Delivery pipeline and other operational aspects of our SaaS platform

What you need to have:

• 6+ years experience as a software engineer
• Desire and a track record of leading and mentoring engineers
• Experience with Elixir and its ecosystem (at least 1 year)
• Good working knowledge of SQL
• Experience with full stack architectures, as well as API design and implementation
• Solid experience with production troubleshooting, performance monitoring, and tuning
• Familiarity with frontend development
• Familiarity with agile, DevOps, and CI/CD
• Experience with cloud architectures

Of course, what is outlined above is an ideal set of expectations, but things may shift based on business needs, and other projects and tasks could be added at the discretion of your manager.

About Dscout

Dscout is a team of passionate, empathetic, and curious professionals. As a recognized leader in the Forrester Wave, we’re at the cutting edge of experience research technology. The power of research drives us—how in-context insights from real people can build more enjoyable products and services. 

We prioritize learning, sharing, and building. We also deeply value being a diverse and inclusive team and company and look for team members who align with that belief. Join our dynamic team and help shape product roadmaps and business strategies for the world’s most loved brands.

It doesn't stop there. When you join the dscout team, you will get:

* A strong and competitive compensation package with a built-in bonus and equity program.

* An incredible and progressive benefits package (for both you and your dependents) to support work/life balance, including flexible PTO, 16 company holidays, 12 weeks of paid parental leave, 401k match, and much more.

* An education stipend to support your growth & development and a remote work stipend.

* A company that is open and transparent with our team. You will know what is happening and why it matters.

Dscout is an equal-opportunity employer that values diversity. We do not discriminate based on identity, including race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex, gender identity and expression, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law.

If you need reasonable accommodations for any part of the employment process, please email us at accommodations@dscout.com with the nature of your request and your contact information. We'll do all we can to ensure you're set up for success during our interview process while upholding your privacy, including accommodation requests. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

When you apply at Dscout, we will process your job applicant data, including your employment and education history, transcript, writing samples, and references, as necessary to consider your job application for open positions. For more information about our privacy practices, please visit our Privacy Policy. 

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