At Dscout, we’re bridging the gap between product team and users, one meaningful experience at a time. Our platform empowers the world’s leading companies to uncover critical insights into user needs and behaviors, driving the development of products and services that truly make a difference.

As a recognized leader in the Forrester Wave, we’re at the cutting edge of experience research technology. Join our dynamic team and work with advanced AI and research tools to analyze data, recruit diverse participants, and deliver insights that shape product roadmaps and business strategies. As a fast-growing, Series C-funded company, we offer you the chance to make a real impact in the user experience field while advancing your career.

Ready to help create better products for millions? Your journey starts at Dscout.

We’re looking for a smart, creative, and driven Lead Software Engineer - Elixir to build great software with us. You have experience creating and launching new products and tackling some technical aspects (performance, scalability, DevOps, etc) and you are eager to keep learning and growing. You love to write code and strive to make it better with each commit. You're familiar with SaaS-focused modern backends, API development, SQL, and don't mind doing an occasional frontend task either. You are hands-on, self-directed, and feel at home in a fast-paced, collaborative, and agile environment.

Our team is growing but we’re not a big company. We work collaboratively, move fast (we deploy to production many times a day), and value technical quality. If you are excited about the challenge of building an incredible product while working alongside a great engineering team, we’d love to hear from you!

Our Platform:

Our web platform is built on React.js frontend and Elixir backend tied together by GraphQL APIs. We make heavy use of PostgreSQL for our storage needs and we host our platform on AWS. Another core part of our offering are two mobile apps - iOS and Android - that are written in Swift and Kotlin respectively. We also employ WebRTC and WebSockets for live video streaming and use GPT-4 & Python for NLP and media processing.

Over ten years and 57K commits later, we've maintained a tidy code base that is well documented and battle-tested by tens of thousands of users.

Working Hours

Standard Hours: 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM CT

While working these core hours is expected in this role, we know that from time-to-time life happens and we can be flexible to meet your needs.

And a few more tech details and challenges we deal with on our backend specifically:

Our platform relies on a mature GraphQL API built on Absinthe
We are a video heavy platform with complex video processing and property based testing for verification (we combine multiple video streams, including screenshares, and we do picture-in-picture generation)
dscout Live, our realtime video interview product, utilizes WebRTC and supports multiple participants
Research survey design involves skip and knockout logic and we verify question flow using graph traversal approach
Exporting gigabytes of video data can be a challenge and we use streaming archive generation for that
We use collaborative workspaces through Phoenix channels and presence
We make heavy use of background job workflows to compose media processing, for ML models, payments, data ingestion, etc and we rely on Oban for the heavy lifting

What you will do:

Be an active member of a cross-functional product development team that frequently interfaces with business stakeholders
Communicate and drive improvement within and across teams as well as mentor other engineers
Focus on the backend and welcome a bit of full stack work
Be responsible for the technical quality of the team's product
Develop customer facing applications in a fast-paced agile environment
Work closely with the design team to deliver user-friendly and modern products
Apply DevOps mindset to improve the Continuous Delivery pipeline and other operational aspects of our SaaS platform

What you need to have:

6+ years experience as a software engineer
Desire and a track record of leading and mentoring engineers
Experience with Elixir and its ecosystem (at least 1 year)
Good working knowledge of SQL
Experience with full stack architectures, as well as API design and implementation
Solid experience with production troubleshooting, performance monitoring, and tuning
Familiarity with frontend development
Familiarity with agile, DevOps, and CI/CD
Experience with cloud architectures

About Dscout

Dscout is a team of passionate research, sales, technical, marketing, design, success, and operations professionals. The power of research drives us—how in-context insights from real people can build more people-centric products and services. We value learning, sharing, and building. We deeply value being a diverse and inclusive team and company and look for team members who align with that belief. We are proud of what Dscout is today and excited to build our future with you.

It doesn't just stop there. When you join the dscout team, you will get:

A strong and competitive compensation package with a built-in bonus and equity program.
An incredible and progressive benefits package (for both you and your dependents) to support work/life balance, including flexible PTO, 16 company holidays, 12 weeks of paid parental leave, 401k match, and much more.
An education stipend to support your growth & development and a remote work stipend.
A company that is open and transparent with our team. You will know what is happening and why it matters.

Dscout is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity. We do not discriminate based on identity, including race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex, gender identity and expression, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law.

If you need reasonable accommodations for any part of the employment process, please email us at accommodations@dscout.com with the nature of your request and your contact information. We'll do all we can to ensure you're set up for success during our interview process while upholding your privacy, including accommodation requests. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

When you apply at Dscout, we will process your job applicant data, including your employment and education history, transcript, writing samples, and references, as necessary to consider your job application for open positions. For more information about our privacy practices, please visit our Privacy Policy.

Dscout participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.

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