Senior Software Engineer

DockYard is hiring a Senior Software Engineer with expertise in Elixir, Phoenix, and React (additional hands-on experience with LiveView is a plus) for a contract engagement building a new multi-tenant platform end-to-end, from backend to frontend.

Who We Are

DockYard is a remote-first, digital product consultancy. Forward-thinking teams come to us to build digital products that scale with their users, features, and complexity.

Using a candid approach to partnerships, we help to upskill teams along the way. The result? More flexibility in how our clients take products from idea to impact.

We don't just use innovative approaches to product development – we lead them. That's why visionary companies have trusted us to overcome complex product challenges.

We're honored to have been included in guides ranging from The Startup Weekly's Exceptional Workplace Award (2021), The BBJ's Fast 50 (2021, 2020), Inc. 5000 (2020, 2019), and Fast Company's Best Places to Work for Innovators (2020), among others.

The Role

DockYard is looking for a Senior Software Engineer with expertise in Elixir, Phoenix, and React (additional hands-on experience with LiveView is a plus). In this role, you may be called upon to augment and accelerate client teams by partnering with them on feature development, or consulting with them on Elixir/React best practices and application architecture. You may also join cross-functional product delivery projects where you will collaborate with both DockYard and Client teams to design and ship quality, high-impact software solutions.

This particular engagement is a greenfield MVP: a multi-tenant platform designed to be configured and re-skinned for multiple brand clients, rather than rebuilt for each one. Our team owns the full stack. You will build the production backend and its JSON API, the customer-facing React frontend, and an internal admin console for the client's operations team. The system's core value is a unified user identity and first-party data layer where every action a person takes across the product resolves to one profile, so consent capture, privacy compliance, and clean data modeling are first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts.

On the frontend, there is an existing AI-generated prototype running on synthetic data. Part of this role is assessing what to keep, rebuilding it properly, wiring it to real APIs, and adjusting the UX where the prototype's assumptions do not survive contact with real data. Comfort inheriting rough code and making a clear, unsentimental call about what to salvage versus rewrite matters here.

The engagement is also integration-heavy. A significant share of the work is connecting to third-party commerce and content platforms through a clean adapter layer, so that adding or swapping a partner is a configuration change rather than a rewrite. Some of these partners are well documented; others have no public developer documentation at all and will require you to work directly with the vendor to establish an integration path.

Because this is an MVP on a compressed timeline, we are specifically looking for engineers who actively reduce complexity. The strongest candidates here are the ones who ship a simpler thing that works, push back on gold-plating, defer what can be deferred, and can explain the tradeoff clearly to a client. Deploy-from-week-one, weekly demos, and honest scope conversations are how this project runs.

The ideal candidate is self-driven, passionate about web technologies, and stays current with industry best practices. They are collaborative but also comfortable working independently when required, and should feel empowered to thrive in environments with open direction and loosely defined requirements. They also relish opportunities to transform complex, legacy codebases into robust, scalable, and maintainable systems. The ideal candidate brings a strong product and consulting mindset to any team.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders to understand business goals and priorities, analyze product requirements, and collaborate on solutions.
• Collaborate with the team to translate product needs into a development roadmap and assist with scoping, sizing, and project planning.
• Design and build a Phoenix backend with a documented JSON API, and build the React frontend that consumes it, owning the contract on both sides.
• Take an AI-generated frontend prototype built on synthetic data and turn it into a production application: assess what to keep, rebuild what needs rebuilding, connect it to live APIs, and refine the UX as real data and requirements land.
• Build multi-tenant data models and tenant-scoped access patterns so a new brand client is a configuration exercise, not a rebuild.
• Implement integrations with third-party commerce and content systems behind well-defined adapter interfaces, including outbound API calls, inbound webhook handling, signature verification, idempotency, retries with backoff, and graceful degradation when a partner is unavailable.
• Work directly with external vendors, some without public API documentation, to establish integration paths, obtain credentials, and validate payload contracts.
• Build background job pipelines (Oban) for asynchronous processing, reconciliation, and event capture that survive traffic bursts and partner outages.
• Build internal admin and operations surfaces in Phoenix LiveView so non-technical client staff can publish content, manage campaigns, and segment users without a developer.
• Move fluidly across the stack, from database and backend services to API design to frontend implementation, without waiting on a handoff.
• Actively manage scope and complexity: recommend the simplest implementation that satisfies the requirement, flag gold-plating, and help the team make explicit build-now vs. defer decisions.
• On staff augmentation projects, you will embed yourself within client teams to evaluate existing codebases, recommend improvements, mentor other engineers, or simply to increase velocity as a highly productive independent contributor.
• Interface directly with clients, leaning on your deep industry experience and proven knowledge of Elixir and Phoenix, but always maintaining an inquisitive and consultative approach.
• When not on client work, you will support internal projects or R&D initiatives, contribute to DockYard-approved open source projects, participate in cultural and/or technical activities, or hone your craft through professional development and mentorship.
• Continually look for opportunities to document and share your knowledge with others.
• You may be asked to travel on occasion.

Must Haves

• 5+ years of experience working across the stack, from database and backend services to API and frontend development using modern technologies and practices
• Production experience with Elixir & Phoenix
• Experience designing and shipping JSON APIs and building the client applications that consume them
• Professional experience with React and modern JavaScript tooling, and the judgment to take a rough or prototype-quality frontend to production quality
• Demonstrated experience integrating third-party APIs and webhooks in production, including authentication schemes, idempotency, retry and error-handling strategies, and rate-limit handling
• Strong PostgreSQL and data modeling skills, including modeling for multi-tenancy or other forms of row-level scoping
• Experience with background job processing (Oban or equivalent) for asynchronous, fault-tolerant workflows
• A demonstrated bias toward simplicity: you can point to times you cut scope, removed complexity, or chose the boring solution, and explain why it was the right call
• Comfort working with ambiguity and making pragmatic decisions when requirements are still being resolved
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams using Agile methodologies
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• You are highly collaborative and value authenticity, equity, and empathy

Nice to Haves

• Experience building white-label, multi-tenant, or re-skinnable SaaS platforms serving multiple business clients
• Experience integrating with poorly documented or undocumented partner APIs, including driving the vendor conversation to get access and specs
• Experience building authentication, consent capture, and privacy compliance flows (GDPR, CCPA, age verification, data-subject requests)
• Experience with high-burst or unpredictable consumer traffic patterns, including caching, rate limiting, and abuse or fraud prevention
• Experience deploying and operating applications on PaaS platforms such as Render.com or Fly.io, with CI/CD and monitoring
• Experience with LiveView
• Experience building admin, CMS, or internal operations tooling for non-technical users
• Experience in the media and entertainment industry, or with consumer-facing brand platforms
• Experience working in a remote environment
• Prior client services, consulting, or freelancing experience

Job Details

Compensation

$80–$110/hr

Employment Type

Contract, 40 hrs/wk, Monday-Friday Eastern Time Zone.

Level

Senior

Location

Remote (US Eastern Standard Business Hours only)

How We Hire

Our process includes an introductory conversation with a member of our Employee Experience team, an interview with our Director of Engineering, a live technical interview with one of our in-house Elixir engineers, and occasionally a final round with the project's client team.

The candidate who interviews is the person we expect to do the work. Substitutions or undisclosed subcontracting aren't permitted. Work is performed from your verified location on approved equipment, and payment is issued only to an account in your legal name. Before an engagement begins, we verify government-issued ID and confirm the legal name and address on file.

Even if you don't feel you're a 100% fit, we'd still love to hear from you!

DockYard is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, veteran status, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, political affiliation, personal appearance, pregnancy, family responsibilities, matriculation, or any other characteristic protected under federal, state, or local law.

This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship.