AppleKid7

Any Elixir coding interview tips?

I’ve never interviewed for an Elixir role and was wondering what it would look like to interview in 2025 for such a role. I’m still very much in the process of learning, trying to build some simple things (that I’d want to build anyway, so I’m not really doing it to attract potential employers per se), but might start mixing it up with other things.

I’ve read open source contributions go a long way these days (in the age of AI, this makes sense to me). However, in a past thread about how to find Elixir jobs, consensus seemed to be that this wasn’t the most efficient way due to the nature of most open source projects and how they look very different from the application code most employers want you to write. What projects would you recommend that aren’t extremely macro-heavy?

Besides that, what kinds of coding exercises, if any, would y’all recommend looking into? Are regular DSA questions like writing Linked Lists, Hash Tables, Trees, sorting stuff, etc, common at all in Elixir interviews??

8 comments

#learning-elixir #interviews #jobs

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2026-05-26 15:39:02 UTC

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camatcode

I certainly can’t speak for every situation - only from my own experience being a technical interviewer.

Open source work is a way to say “Hey, I know what I’m doing” - as far as projects, honestly, just work on stuff that makes you happy.

If its the right fit, the team has taken a lot of time crafting the technical interview experience. For us, our technical interviews weren’t designed to trick you and assumed you were nervous. The most critical part, for me, is that you worked through the issues, and discussed them, using me as a peer to bounce things off of.

Our interview process had 4 issues to work though, I’ll just describe what each was about

Can you find and correct a spelling mistake
Could you look at a partially completed unit test and complete it.
Could you filter out a piece of erroneous data.
Would you be able to spot an inefficiency?
- If you didn’t, that’s actually OK. There was a harder way to complete the problem. It just told me what you might need to work on.

And honestly, that’s it. As analytical people, we often overthink things. You’ll do great!

Post #1

camatcode

we did tell you what the correct spelling was!

Post #3

dimitarvp

May I present to you… … GitHub - crate-ci/typos: Source code spell checker · GitHub (I am not the author).

Post #4

Last Post!

Null-logic-0

I’m relatively new to the Elixir ecosystem, coming from a Ruby on Rails and JavaScript background, but over the past few months, I’ve built around 8 production-ready demo projects with Phoenix and LiveView systems with real architectural complexity, not just CRUD applications.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the Elixir community seems to value different signals compared to more mainstream ecosystems, so I wanted to ask from an interviewer’s perspective:

When evaluating Elixir candidates, what tends to carry more weight: high-quality personal projects that demonstrate OTP/distributed systems thinking, or meaningful open-source contributions to the ecosystem?

I’m especially interested in understanding what separates someone who simply uses Phoenix from someone companies would consider a strong Elixir engineer.

Post #8