The posting
Driftrock is hiring a Senior Elixir Engineer to join one of our product squads and help build the marketing technology that powers vehicle sales for some of the world's biggest car brands.
Quick facts
- Team: Engineering
- Reports to: Engineering Team Lead
- Location: Remote, UK or abroad, with a few hours of daily UK overlap
- Contract: Full time, permanent
- Salary: £60,000 to £80,000, plus share options
- Start date: As soon as we find the right person
Why this role exists
Driftrock's product runs on a pragmatic Elixir and Phoenix LiveView stack, solving real marketing challenges for our B2B customers. As more of the world's biggest car brands come on board, we're growing our engineering team and the volume of data we process for them. Right now we're building lead qualification across communication channels and bringing it together in our Single Customer View, optimising our event-driven architecture for growing workloads, and expanding into a new vertical where people will use Driftrock day to day.
You'll join a small, high-discipline squad, ship to production from your first weeks, and take ownership of substantial features from design through to rollout. You'll work alongside engineers who care about how they build, and you'll have a real say in how the squad works and what it builds.
What you'll be working with
Our platform is a set of Elixir services that talk to each other over APIs and RabbitMQ, store data in PostgreSQL and Redis, and run background work with Oban. The UI is server-rendered with Phoenix LiveView and TailwindCSS. We lean on Extreme Programming, test-driven development and pair programming, plan weekly, and keep a close eye on how the product behaves through observability and data. A small amount of legacy Ruby is on its way to Elixir.
What you'll own
You'll own the delivery of features within your squad end to end, shipping well-tested, production-ready Elixir that moves our product and our customers' results forward, and helping set the technical bar for the people around you.
Your first 90 days
- By day 30: you've found your feet in our codebase and domain, paired across the squad, and shipped your first changes to production.
- By day 60: you're picking up substantial features independently, from design to rollout, and taking an active part in technical and product discussions.
- By day 90: you're a trusted senior member of your squad, shipping regularly, pairing with others to keep quality high, and starting to shape how we approach problems.
What you'll be doing
- Build and ship product features in Elixir and Phoenix LiveView, from idea through to production, several times a week.
- Design the data models and services behind new features, and plan the changes and migrations that take them safely to production.
- Work across our event-driven architecture, building services that talk over APIs and RabbitMQ and handling a growing volume of customer data reliably.
- Write well-tested, maintainable code using test-driven development, and use pairing and code reviews to keep quality high across the squad.
- Help shape the how and the why, bringing your own viewpoint to technical and product discussions and to our roadmap.
- Use data and observability to understand how your changes behave in production and whether they're delivering value for customers.
- Share what you know, pairing with and mentoring other engineers and bringing ideas from outside the Elixir ecosystem into how we build.
What you'll bring
- A track record of designing and shipping backend systems in production, including relational databases and data modelling, with the judgement to make and stand by technical decisions.
- A solid grounding in computer science fundamentals, from a degree or equivalent experience: data structures, algorithms, complexity and how systems behave under the hood.
- Professional experience in Elixir, or deep experience in another backend language and a genuine drive to make Elixir your main tool.
- Comfort with asynchronous, event-driven systems, where several services work on the same data in parallel.
- Experience with web development
- Interest in more than one language and stack: you're comfortable on Linux and with Docker, and you like finding out what other ecosystems do well.
- A habit of writing tested, maintainable code, and a genuine interest in continuous delivery, TDD, pairing, code review and retrospectives.
- The judgement to use AI tools well: you use them to go faster, and your grounding means you can evaluate what they produce and steer away from suboptimal solutions rather than taking the output on faith.
Bonus points
- A background in Ruby or another functional language.
- Depth in RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL or Redis.
- Exposure to Kubernetes, Terraform or Google Cloud.
- Experience mentoring engineers.
Not sure you tick every box? Please apply anyway.
Why Driftrock
Driftrock's mission is to become the world-leading automotive and e-mobility marketing software platform, and help accelerate the transition to clean transport.
We work with some of the world's biggest brands, including BMW, BYD, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, and partner with the world's leading platforms, including Meta, Google, mobile.de and Auto Trader.
We've been building since 2013, and our work enables billions of euros in vehicle sales every year.
We're a close, fully remote team of 40 people across engineering, design, customer success, performance and commercial, spread across the world.
That means your work has a real, visible impact on our product, our culture and how we operate.
We're at the cutting edge of marketing technology, with plenty of room to unlock value from data and to help speed up the shift to electric vehicles.
How we work is shaped by four values:
- We care: about our team, our customers, and the people who see the marketing messages that we power. Work isn't done until we can prove it's useful to both the consumer and the customer.
- Be that person: if something needs fixing, fix it. It's never someone else's problem.
- People-first: we put people at the core of everything, and never compromise security or privacy for results.
- Be better today than you were yesterday: we bake learning and continuous improvement into everything we do, for ourselves and our customers.
In practice, this looks like weekly Monday Showcases where we share what we're learning, regular retros, a budget to attend the courses and conferences that grow you, Donut coffee pairings to stay connected, and an annual company Summit that brings the whole global team together in person.
What's in it for you
We're remote-first and flexible about how and where you work, with co-working space available if you want it. Alongside your salary:
- Share options (in 2027) in Driftrock, on founder-friendly, tax-efficient EMI terms, including the option to retain vested options after leaving (at board discretion).
- Comprehensive Vitality health cover: medical, dental, vision, hearing, mental-health support and therapy, cancer cover, a free Headspace subscription and Vitality rewards.
- 24 to 28 days' holiday (24 + 1 extra each year, capped at 28), plus bank holidays.
- Pension contributions, life assurance (3x salary) and income protection.
- Electric car salary-sacrifice scheme (Octopus): save up to ~40%, with insurance, servicing and a charging perk included.
- Enhanced maternity and paternity leave.
- A learning budget for books, courses and conferences, plus time for personal goals.
- Perks and discounts via CharlieHR, and a BMW Group employee discount programme.
Outside the UK? We're remote-first and hire globally. While some UK-specific benefits are delivered differently abroad, we strive for genuine parity. Wherever you are, the standard package includes a comprehensive health plan, pension contributions, paid time off including local bank holidays, share options, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, a learning budget, and our flexible working culture. International team members are employed compliantly via an Employer of Record (Remote.com).
Our hiring process
- A short intro call.
- A conversation with the hiring manager.
- A practical task based on real challenges, never unpaid spec work.
- A final conversation with the team.
Inclusion at Driftrock
Driftrock is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of every background, identity and life experience, and we're building a team that reflects the people our marketing reaches. We don't make decisions based on age, disability, gender, gender identity, marital status, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, or sexual orientation. If you need any adjustments to the application or interview process to do your best, just let us know, and we're glad to help.
We will not be considering recruitment agencies for this role.
By applying for this job you give us permission to store your data on our secure applicant tracking system and to contact you about Driftrock job opportunities. We process your data for recruitment purposes only and keep it until this role is filled, after which we will delete it or, with your agreement, keep it for similar future roles for up to 12 months. See our privacy policy at driftrock.com/privacy-policy for how we comply with GDPR, including how to access, correct, delete or restrict the data we hold. You can lodge a complaint with the UK supervisory authority (the Information Commissioner's Office), or contact our DPO for any concerns.
