Mysterious Clojure jobs and where to find them

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So you have read a few articles, watched some Hickey talks, and dabbled with the REPL. You want to graduate from the hobbyist level and write Clojure professionally?

I was in this position a few years ago and soon realized that there are way fewer Clojure jobs compared to JavaScript or Python. But many companies use Clojure, and you can easily find them if you know where to look. This article is a collection of resources and techniques that might help you land a Clojure job.

Clojure is a superpower. In my biased opinion, it's a radical way of building systems. Check out my other posts or YouTube video if you'd like to learn more about the rationale of Clojure.

Two paths in

There are two broad ways by which you can start working with Clojure professionally:

1. Find a job at an established company
2. Introduce Clojure to your team / Start a Clojure company

Depending on your situation, one of the ways might be easier for you. In this article, I'll focus on the first path. To learn more about the second path, check out Should you adopt Clojure at your company?

Brave Clojure Jobs

Brave Clojure is a book that not just teaches you Clojure API, but also the rationale about it. It helps you build a thought process and is a great resource for beginners.

Apart from being an awesome book, it's also a job board for Clojure. There are 8-10 openings consistently listed on their website. It's perhaps the most active niche job board.

Reddit and HN Hiring Threads

On the first day of every month, a "Who is hiring" thread is automatically posted on Hacker News and Clojure subreddit. There usually are about 5 Clojure jobs in each thread every month.

You can use this nifty tool by Kenny Tilton to search for Clojure-specific jobs. At the time of this writing, there were 17 Clojure jobs posted on Hacker News for June 2021. This usually ranges between 8-10.

Clojurians Slack #jobs channel

The Clojurians Slack is a gold mine. It's a tight-knit community where you can find answers to all your Clojure questions. It's common to see famous open-source contributors helping newbies out.

The #jobs and #remote-jobs channel is an active stream of Clojure openings. From my rough estimates, it's common to see 5 new job posts every week.

Google search hack

This is by far the best way in my opinion. Advertised Clojure jobs are visible to everyone. This means you have to compete against other candidates. But many companies don't advertise their openings, because they expect to hire by reference or personal outreach. You can find these openings by using the site: operator on Google.

The idea is simple: Google indexes all pages on the internet. If there is a Clojure job, it'd be posted on some HR platform, and Google would index it. So if we can come up with a list of famous HR platforms, we can use the search operators like: clojure site:bamboohr.com:

Google search for Clojure jobs on Bamboo HR

There are 5 famous HR platforms that I know of:

1. Workable - clojure site:workable.com
2. Bamboo HR - clojure site:bamboohr.com
3. Greenhouse - clojure site:greenhouse.io
4. Breezy - clojure site:breezy.hr
5. Lever - clojure site:lever.co

By searching these platforms for the keywords "clojure" and "clojurescript", you can expect to find as many as 20 unlisted jobs every month. This hack can also be used for other not-so-famous but loved languages like Haskell.

Bonus: meet ups and online events

This is not straight forward, but attending meet ups introduces you to companies working with Clojure, and some times they might even float some openings.

London Clojurians is an active online meet up. Attending online and in-person events introduces you to people using the technology. This can potentially translate to an internal recommendation.

Conclusion

This article talks about various non-traditional ways to discover Clojure jobs. Apart from the methods listed, the usual resources like LinkedIn and Indeed might also have some listings. I hope this article helped you out. If you have any questions or queries, feel free to reach out on Twitter.

In the next article, I'll talk about how to develop Clojure talent in-house and the pros and cons of choosing Clojure for your startup.