Senior Elixir Backend Engineer

Senior Software Engineer – React Native & Expo

8seats | Full-Time | Remote-Friendly (Australia)

Australian Based Only - No recruiters

About 8seats

8seats is a venture-backed startup on a mission to bring team messaging to everyone – not just people behind desks. We're building a next-gen business messaging platform with a unique, patent-pending interface that's inspired by how people have conversations in real life. We’ve closed our seed round and are scaling the team as we prepare for growth.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Backend Developer with deep expertise in Elixir and the BEAM VM to help us push the boundaries of what real-time messaging can look like at scale. You will own the architecture, performance and reliability of the services that power every conversation on the platform, from Phoenix Channels at the edge to the data layer that keeps everything consistent.

This is a systems-level role. You will be responsible for designing high-throughput, low-latency services, shaping our database strategy across Postgres and DynamoDB, and making the infrastructure and security decisions that allow us to grow safely from seed to Series A and beyond. You will work closely with our frontend engineers to refine the data sync patterns that make our offline-first mobile experience feel instant, and partner with leadership on the technical direction of the platform.

We are hiring you for your backend depth, but we expect you to grow into the full stack over time. As you settle in, you will develop a working understanding of our React Native and Expo frontend so you can shape end-to-end product behaviour rather than throw contracts over a wall.

Who You Are

• You have at least 6 years of professional backend engineering experience, with substantial production time in Elixir and a deep working knowledge of the BEAM VM, OTP and supervision trees.
• You have designed, shipped and operated real-time systems in production and understand Phoenix Channels, backpressure and the failure modes that come with persistent connections at scale.
• You have strong system design and architectural instincts honed across multiple production systems, and you think in terms of data flow, failure boundaries and operational behaviour rather than endpoints and modules.
• You have deep experience designing and managing databases in production, including Postgres (schema design, indexing strategy, query performance, operational health) and DynamoDB (access patterns, partition design, consistency trade-offs).
• You have strong AWS or equivalent cloud provider experience and have personally owned the infrastructure decisions behind the systems you have shipped.
• You are an active user of AI development tools who leverages them as an accelerator while maintaining a healthy scepticism about their output and taking full responsibility for the correctness, security and architectural integrity of every line you submit.
• You have a strong sense for when to build, when to buy and when to defer, and you make those calls in service of shipping product and reaching the next stage of growth.
• DevOps maturity and a strong sense for technical security are highly desired, including comfort with CI/CD, observability, secrets management and the kinds of decisions that keep a real-time platform safe under load.

Engineering Excellence in the Age of AI

We are looking for engineers who are genuinely fluent with modern AI tooling and who will use it deliberately and effectively to ship product features to customers at a higher standard – not engineers who avoid it, and not engineers who lean on it so heavily they cannot explain their own pull requests.

• You are a confident daily user of tools like Claude Code, Cursor or equivalents, with a clear point of view on where they accelerate you and where they get in the way.

• You practise real context engineering and are comfortable with RAG-style and agentic workflows, including extending internal tooling, MCP servers and pipelines that give AI useful access to our code, docs and systems.

• You use AI aggressively for deterministic and repetitive work, apply healthy scepticism to its output, and are able to stand behind every line in your pull requests. You ensure that the burden of code understanding and verification stays with yourself as the author, not the reviewer

• How to Apply

Email careers@8seats.com with:

• Your CV.
• A short video (approx. 2 min) – introduce yourself, tell us why 8seats excites you, and share a technical challenge you’re proud of solving. Upload to YouTube (unlisted), Loom, Google Drive – whatever’s easy.

A quick video helps us get to know you beyond a resume. Keep it casual - a phone recording is perfectly fine. Applications with a video will be considered more highly.

• 8seats is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds.