Hire the Top 1% of Erlang Developers
Hire an Erlang developer to build or look after systems that must stay up while handling many connections at once. They work with OTP, message passing and the BEAM virtual machine. We find and vet the candidates, you interview a shortlist and you choose who starts.
Trusted by 3,000+ businesses worldwide
Why hire an Erlang developer through DigiWorks
Built to stay up
Supervision trees and clear failure rules mean one broken task is restarted without taking the service down.
Many tasks at once
Lightweight processes and message passing let one system handle many connections or jobs side by side.
Clear view of a live system
Tracing, metrics and the Erlang shell help your engineer see what a running node is doing and why it is slow.
Paperwork taken off your desk
We prepare the agreement and send the monthly pay. Your repositories, servers and cloud accounts stay under your own logins.
Fees shown separately
Your invoice lists the developer’s pay and our fee on separate lines, which keeps the budget easy to plan.
Why Choose DigiWorks to Hire an Erlang Developer?
Optional Trial / Guarantee
Experience Erlang Developer on your workflow – risk-free.
Service Breakdown
Teams reach for Erlang in a few situations. The first four boxes compare the usual choices for a busy backend, and the last two show the work our developers take on.
A general backend language
Fine for most web services. Handling many long-lived connections and failures safely takes extra libraries and care.
A message broker alone
Moves messages between services. The services that read and write them still need to be built and kept running.
Elixir on the same platform
Elixir runs on the BEAM, the same virtual machine as Erlang. It is a newer language, and many teams mix the two.
An Erlang developer through DigiWorks
One engineer who knows OTP, the BEAM and production operation, and who works inside your codebase. We run the search and the screening, and the final choice is yours.
Build and extend
New services, protocol handlers, queues and APIs, written in a clear OTP style.
Operate and improve
Find slow spots, fix memory problems, plan upgrades and keep a running cluster healthy.
Video Customer Testimonials
Remodelmate
Logan Phillips (Head of Operations)
Drunk Yoga
Eli Walker (Founder)
Ovalz
Marvin Harris (Founder)
Ways to hire an erlang developer
You can hire in-house, through a freelance platform, through an agency, or through DigiWorks. With DigiWorks, candidates are pre-vetted, you interview them and choose who to hire, and contracts and payments are handled for you.
Founder Story
Hi, We're Monica & Rolphy!
We founded DigiWorks after seeing how broken hiring and team building had become: slow, expensive, and limited by geography. Companies were either overpaying locally or struggling to manage remote talent effectively.
We built DigiWorks to fix that. By combining global talent access with structured systems for hiring, onboarding, and performance, we make it possible for companies to build high-performing teams anywhere in the world.
Most business owners waste enormous time and cash because they don’t know how to hire, manage, or scale remote teams, especially technical ones.
We believe this is a fundamental shift. The best companies won’t be defined by where they hire, but by how effectively they build and operate global teams, and DigiWorks sits at the centre of that change.
– Monica & Rolphy
Zero-Risk Hiring Starts Here
See how a remote team member performs inside your workflow, completely risk-free.
Find Out How DigiWorks Helps Businesses Find Contractors
Industries we hire for
DigiWorks hires for companies in healthcare, finance, retail and ecommerce, real estate, education and other sectors.
Looking for Another Role?
Check out other roles to find candidates who fit your needs.
Transparent compensation
We help you hire and keep skilled erlang developers with clear role definitions, transparent compensation and pre-vetted global talent. With DigiWorks, you always know exactly what your hire earns and what goes to us.
Compensation for an erlang developer depends on seniority, skills and hours. Ask us for current rates.
Ready to hire an Erlang developer?
Share what the system does, how many connections or messages it handles, which OTP version you run and what you want improved. You will meet engineers who have worked on similar systems, and you pick the one you trust. A single call gets this moving.
What our Erlang developers do
OTP design
Use gen_server, gen_statem, supervisors and applications to give each part of the system a clear job.
Concurrent services
Build services where each connection or job runs in its own lightweight process.
Fault tolerance
Plan how parts fail and restart, so a single error does not spread through the system.
Clustering and distribution
Connect several nodes, share work between them and handle network splits with care.
Performance and memory tuning
Use profiling and tracing tools to find slow code, large mailboxes and memory growth.
Messaging and protocols
Work with TCP, WebSockets, MQTT, AMQP and message queues such as RabbitMQ, which is itself written in Erlang.
Releases and upgrades
Build releases with rebar3, package them and plan safe upgrades of a running system.
Testing
Write tests with EUnit and Common Test, and use property-based testing for tricky logic.
A guide to hiring an Erlang developer
Erlang is a programming language built for systems that must keep running while they handle many tasks at the same time. It runs on the BEAM virtual machine and comes with OTP, a set of libraries and design rules for building services that restart cleanly after a fault. Messaging, chat, telecom and real-time systems are common places to find it. Here is what an Erlang developer does, how the role differs from nearby jobs and how to work well with a remote engineer. Teams that run an Erlang system, or plan one, will find it most useful.
What an Erlang developer is responsible for
The job is to build and look after services that run for a long time. An Erlang developer designs how work is split into processes, writes the supervisors that restart failed parts and chooses how data is stored and shared. They tune running systems, read traces and metrics, and plan upgrades. They also write tests and notes so that other developers can work on the code without fear.
How an Erlang developer differs from other backend roles
An Erlang developer works with one language and one way of thinking about failure. A back end developer covers servers and services in many languages. An API developer focuses on the interfaces that other systems call. If your project connects devices, our IoT developer page may also help. Use the Erlang page when your service is already written in Erlang or you want its approach to concurrency and recovery.
When an Erlang developer makes sense
- You run a messaging, chat or real-time service that must not go down.
- Your Erlang system has no owner, and nobody on the team is confident changing it.
- A node uses more memory over time, or a queue keeps growing.
- You plan to move to a newer OTP version or to add Elixir next to the Erlang code.
- You need to connect your Erlang service to a database, a queue or a new API.
If you are building a simple website or a short data job, a developer in a more common language is usually the easier hire.
Reading an Erlang developer’s background
Look for systems that ran in production, not only small examples. Ask what the service did, how many parts it had, what failed and how the developer found the cause. Good answers include a specific incident, the fix and what changed afterwards. Be careful with a background that lists only a course or a hobby project. Reading about OTP is a start, but operating a live system teaches a lot more.
Interview questions to try
- Explain how a supervision tree works and how you would choose a restart strategy.
- A process mailbox keeps growing. How do you find out why, and what do you change?
- When would you use ETS, and when would you use an outside database?
- How would you upgrade a running system without dropping users?
- Tell us about the worst production incident you handled. What did you learn?
Listen for calm, specific answers with a real example. Doubt anyone who has never watched a system fail.
Try a paid mini project
Give each finalist a small task based on your own code or a similar example. Useful examples are a small service with a supervisor, a bug in a message handler or a memory growth problem in a sample project. Pay for the time. Look at how they read the code, how they use tracing and whether they explain the result clearly.
Match the person to your stage
A new service needs someone who can set up a clean OTP structure and good habits early. An older system needs someone patient who can add tests and metrics before changing behavior. A system under heavy load needs someone who is comfortable with profiling and with talking to the people who run the servers. Job titles vary, so ask which parts of the work each person owned.
Agree the routine
Set the working hours and the review routine at the start. Code review, a short weekly call and a shared list of known issues work well for most teams. Give your developer access to a test environment first, and add production access only as needed. Keep ownership of repositories, servers and cloud accounts in your company name, and remove access when the work ends.
Mistakes to avoid
- Letting a process do too many jobs, so one failure takes down unrelated work.
- Ignoring mailbox size until the node runs out of memory.
- Skipping tests and metrics because the system seems to run fine.
- Changing a live system without a plan for rolling back.
- Giving a contractor the only login to your servers or repositories.
Want to compare roles before you decide? See our back end developer page, or read about our API developers if you also need the interfaces built.
