Mark Wilbur, Taipei - Senior Elixir/Phoenix Engineer for async-friendly codebase diagnostics, backend rescue, scraping & data pipelines

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Hi everyone,

I’m available immediately for short-term Elixir/Phoenix contract work, especially technical debt remediation, production debugging, data pipeline work, and feature delivery in existing codebases.

You may know me as the creator of Alchemist Camp, where I produced 200+ Elixir screencasts and tutorials. My strongest fit is dropping into complex or messy production systems, understanding them quickly, and shipping clean, maintainable improvements with minimal hand-holding.

I’m also offering short diagnostic engagements for teams that are not ready to commit to a longer contract yet.

Typical format:

  • 90-minute architecture/debugging call, or
  • 10–20 hours reviewing the codebase, logs, tickets, and deployment setup
  • written findings and prioritized action plan
  • initial fixes where possible
  • option to continue hourly or as a short-term contract

A few relevant highlights:

  • Director of Engineering at Homepie: evaluated the team/codebase, removed 100K+ lines of technical debt, and built scraping/listing infrastructure that supported national expansion
  • Sole architect of A1X’s initial distributed crypto trading platform
  • Early full-stack engineer at Verbling (YC11): worked across the web stack, growth engineering, ad optimization, and the v1 of a multi-armed bandit system
  • Long background in Elixir/Phoenix, Ruby/Rails, JavaScript, Postgres, marketplaces, data munging, scraping, and backend architecture. Experience with Phoenix LiveView on the frontend involving complex, multi-step forms with embedded schemas.

Logistics:

I’m based in Taipei, Taiwan. I’m on a Taiwan Gold Card with open work permission, and I’m a US citizen with a US bank account, so I can sign standard W-9 / 1099 contracts. I work very well asynchronously and can often use the time zone difference productively: clearing tickets, investigating issues, reviewing code, and pushing fixes while US teams are offline, with scheduled overlap for handoffs and decisions.

Best fit:

  • Elixir/Phoenix applications
  • legacy-code cleanup
  • production bugs
  • Postgres/data issues
  • scraping or ETL-style pipelines
  • marketplace applications
  • feature delivery in existing systems
  • AI/RAG integration where the hard part is backend/data reliability rather than prompts

Links:

If you know a team that could use senior Elixir/backend help this month, I’d appreciate an intro.

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