A wave of layoffs and failed raises has put a generation of senior Elixir engineers on the market at once. For founders building on the stack, the talent that is usually impossible to reach is suddenly available.
If you have ever tried to hire Elixir developers, you will know the usual problem. The pool is small, the good ones are rarely looking, and the language barely registers with most founders until someone technical insists on it. That picture has changed in the last few weeks, and if you build on Elixir it is worth understanding why.
I spend most weeks talking to engineers. In three days I had fifteen conversations with senior Elixir people. Not juniors chasing a trendy language. People with ten years in it, who have run real time systems handling hundreds of millions of transactions. What struck me was not the calibre. It was why so many of them were available at the same time.
Why so many senior Elixir engineers are on the market
Almost none of them left by choice. One cluster came out of a single business hit by repeated redundancies. Another had been through an engineering cut of nearly half the team. Two came from startups that could not close their next round. One was leaving because his company is pivoting off Elixir toward React, for the blunt reason that React talent is easier to hire.
That last one matters, because it is the supply problem in miniature. Teams keep deprioritising Elixir not because it underperforms, but because they fear they cannot staff it. Every time one does, more strong Elixir engineers land on the market, and the engineers who remain feel the pool of roles shrinking around them. One candidate, two months into his search, described the opportunities as “limited”. You end up with unusually strong supply and a group of people who feel there is nowhere obvious to go.
For a founder building on the stack, that is the opening.
The pool is small, so your process has to respect it
Availability is not the same as ease. These are senior people who have been let down, and they are screening you as hard as you screen them. The fastest way to lose them is a process that feels careless: a generic take home, weeks of silence, an algorithm puzzle that has nothing to do with the job.
The roles that land with them tend to share a shape. A real conversation with a founder or technical lead, then a practical paired session on something close to the actual work. One candidate told me he was drawn to a role purely because the process was “a conversation with a founder and a pairing session”, a model he said is “rare to find”. Another asked, before anything else, whether the test would be “paired or algorithmic”, so he could prepare. Your interview format is your employer brand. With senior Elixir engineers it is doing more work than your job advert.
What they actually want
Two things came up again and again, and salary was not the first.
Stability. After layoffs, contractor cuts and pivots, the burned ones want to know the runway is real and the role will still exist in a year. One said flatly he was “tired of short stints, contractor cuts, and repeated layoffs”. Answer that question before he has to ask it. Be honest about funding and about what the first year looks like.
AI maturity. This is newer. Two candidates raised AI before I did. One asked outright what the company’s expectations around AI were. Another came with a list of questions about how teams are actually adopting it and how interviews have changed. The strong ones are not afraid of it, they use it daily, but they want to know you have a considered position rather than a panic or a ban.
How to actually hire them
Three practical points. First, go remote and be ready for B2B. Almost every one of these engineers was based across Europe, in Poland, Latvia, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and beyond, and contracting on a B2B basis. If you restrict to UK PAYE only, you are fishing in a fraction of the pool. Second, run a real, practical interview and move quickly through it. Third, when you find one you want, decide with conviction. The reason this window is open is that good people are between things, and good people between things do not stay there long.
The window is open
Hiring Elixir developers has quietly gone from one of the harder briefs I take to one of the most rewarding. The talent is there, it is senior, and for once it is reachable. If you are building on Elixir and want to move while this window is open, I am happy to talk it through.
Arjun Gillard
Founder, AG Talent
agtalent.co.uk
