Senior Elixir Platform Lead - New York - Fairing

Description

Senior Elixir Engineer

Fairing is a zero-party data attribution platform that bridges the gap between metrics and meaning. While most analytics tools tell brands what happened, we help them understand why. We capture insights customers willingly share at the moment of conversion, currently through post-purchase surveys, to solve the hardest problem in modern marketing: accurate attribution.

We serve over 3,000 high-growth brands including Skims, Bombas, and Insurify, helping them make data-driven decisions about marketing attribution, particularly for hard-to-measure channels like podcasts, influencer marketing, and word of mouth. As a profitable, sustainable business, we prioritize solving real problems over chasing funding rounds.

We're seeking a Senior Elixir Engineer to become our CTO's technical partner and eventual platform lead. This is a pivotal role for our six-person product team at a critical inflection point. You'll join as the senior-most engineer alongside our CTO and two other engineers (both strong Elixir practitioners), with a clear path to leading platform development as we scale.

This position offers the unique opportunity to work as a high-impact individual contributor today while positioning yourself to lead platform architecture and team development tomorrow. Your work will directly shape how thousands of customers solve their attribution challenges and make better marketing investment decisions.

While we welcome remote candidates across the Americas time zones and evaluate all candidates equally regardless of location, we have a preference for candidates based in New York City who can collaborate in-person with our CPTO and Product Manager for high-bandwidth strategic planning and architectural discussions. Remote candidates have the same opportunities for growth, leadership, and advancement. Location does not affect your trajectory to platform lead.

Ship features that solve real customer problems. Write production code daily and deliver features that directly impact how customers understand their marketing attribution. You'll work on systems that process millions of zero-party data points monthly and provide real-time attribution insights to major brands during their most critical sales periods. Success means customers making better decisions because of what you built.

Lead platform architecture with customer impact in mind. Own technical decision-making for our attribution platform's evolution, always connecting architectural choices to customer outcomes. You'll identify and resolve performance bottlenecks before they impact customers, design fault-tolerant systems using Elixir's supervision capabilities, and establish architectural patterns that scale with our growing customer base and increasingly sophisticated attribution models.

Establish engineering standards and elevate the team. As our most senior IC, you'll help shape engineering culture through documentation practices, testing standards, and architectural patterns that will guide the team as we grow. Collaborate closely with our engineering team to establish code review standards, share expertise in advanced Elixir patterns, and act as a technical resource for complex challenges. Your guidance will help the entire team grow their skills and deliver higher-quality solutions.

Partner with product to bridge strategy and execution. Collaborate closely with our Product Manager and CPTO to transform customer problems and strategic goals into well-scoped engineering initiatives. You'll evaluate technical feasibility of proposed features, break down complex initiatives into deliverable phases, and establish realistic project milestones. This partnership requires participating in product discussions to bring technical perspective to what we should build, advocating for technical quality while maintaining focus on delivering customer value, and ensuring alignment between the product roadmap and our platform's evolution.

Required qualifications include production Elixir expertise, advanced PostgreSQL knowledge, curiosity about customer problems, self-direction and autonomy, clear technical communication, and product partnership experience. Preferred qualifications include experience mentoring or leading other engineers, familiarity with Phoenix LiveView for building interactive features, background in marketing measurement or other high-traffic applications, experience with gradual system refactoring and technical debt management, and understanding of distributed systems and fault tolerance patterns.

We're committed to developing you into our platform lead. Here's what that trajectory looks like:

Months 1-3: Establish technical credibility by shipping meaningful features, understanding our architecture deeply, and building trust with the team and CPTO.

Months 4-9: Take ownership of major technical initiatives, mentor other engineers, and begin making architectural decisions independently with CPTO guidance.

Months 10-18: Lead platform architecture decisions, own the technical roadmap, and establish team processes as we prepare to grow the engineering team.

Beyond 18 months: Step into the platform lead role, taking full ownership of technical strategy, infrastructure decisions, and engineering team development as we scale from 4 to 8+ engineers.

Success in this progression means consistently delivering high-quality solutions that move the needle for customers, earning team trust through technical excellence and clear communication, and demonstrating sound judgment on architectural trade-offs. The timeline is flexible based on your growth and business needs. Some may move faster, but this represents our typical expectation.

What "Platform Lead" Means: This role remains primarily technical and IC-focused. You'll own architectural decisions, set technical direction, and guide other engineers through code review, architectural discussions, and technical mentorship. As the team grows, you'll have the opportunity to take on direct reports if that interests you, but people management is not a requirement of the platform lead role. The focus is on technical leadership and being the senior technical voice on platform decisions.

We believe in keeping infrastructure straightforward so we can focus on solving sophisticated customer problems. We avoid complexity and value mastery over novelty.

Application: Elixir with Phoenix framework, utilizing server-rendered HTML and LiveView for interactive components where it provides clear value.

Database: PostgreSQL as our primary data store. If it can be done in Postgres, we do it there.

Infrastructure: Hosted on Fly, deployed as a monolith.

Approach: Functional programming principles where they improve code quality, pragmatism where it delivers better outcomes for customers.

Exceptional impact. As our fourth engineer, your contributions will directly influence product direction, technical strategy, and business outcomes. You'll see the results of your work immediately reflected in how thousands of customers solve their marketing attribution challenges and make better investment decisions.

Technical leadership opportunity. This role offers a clear, structured path to platform leadership. You'll have significant input on architectural decisions from day one and the opportunity to define our engineering culture as we scale.

Customer connection. Unlike roles where you're many layers removed from users, you'll see direct feedback on features you ship. When a customer finally understands which marketing channels are actually driving their sales, that's your work making a difference.

Sustainable growth. We're a profitable business that values thoughtful progress over hypergrowth. We maintain reasonable working hours, prioritize work-life balance, and make technical decisions with long-term maintainability in mind.

Meaningful problems. You'll tackle genuinely interesting technical challenges: building systems that process millions of data points, ensuring sub-second query performance at scale, and creating infrastructure that remains reliable during traffic spikes. As we add more intelligence to our attribution platform (systems that improve data quality, detect patterns in customer responses, and adapt collection methods), you'll help build the infrastructure that makes these features feel instantaneous. All in service of helping customers solve the hardest attribution problems in modern marketing.

Professional development. Work directly with an experienced CTO who values mentorship and knowledge sharing. You'll have opportunities to deepen your expertise in Elixir, PostgreSQL, and distributed systems architecture.

Compensation and benefits include a base salary of $225,000 - $260,000 USD based on experience, equity stake in a profitable, growing company, comprehensive health benefits, flexible remote work arrangements (or hybrid for NYC-based candidates), and modern equipment and tooling.

Fairing is committed to building an inclusive team that reflects the diversity of the customers we serve. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and encourage applications from individuals who are underrepresented in technology, including women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, and veterans.

We recognize that great candidates may not check every box in this job description. If you're excited about this role and believe your skills and experience would make you successful, we encourage you to apply even if your background doesn't perfectly match every qualification listed.

We believe in a transparent hiring process. Here's what to expect:

• Initial screen min) - Conversation with our CPTO about your background and mutual fit
• Elixir technical discussion (60 min) - Deep dive into Elixir and OTP with our engineering team
• Data & analytics discussion (60 min) - PostgreSQL expertise and analytical problem-solving with our data team
• Product collaboration (45 min) - Discussion with our Product Manager about problem-solving and communication
• Group exercise (90 min) - Collaborative session with the product team working through a real technical spec
• CEO conversation min) - Final conversation about vision and culture

The full process typically