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

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:

• GitHub: logicmason (Mark Wilbur) · GitHub
• Email: [on resume]( Mark Wilbur 2026 - Google Docs )
• Alchemist Camp: https://alchemist.camp

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