Amos King on sharing knowledge
From Elixir Mentor by Jacob Luetzow
February 21, 2026 · 1h 37m · Season 1 · Episode 74
About this episode
Amos King discusses mentorship, team dynamics, and his journey in software engineering on the Elixir Mentor Podcast.
In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I sit down with Amos King, Senior Staff Backend Engineer at Adobe, founder of Binary Noggin, and longtime Elixir community contributor. We dig into mentorship, knowledge sharing, and the team dynamics that make software organizations actually thrive. Amos traces his non-traditional path into software — from structural engineering to manufacturing automation to Erlang on Navy submarines — and explains how that background shapes how he thinks about building reliable systems. We talk about his decade running Binary Noggin, why he ultimately made the move to Adobe, and the hard lessons learned when the consulting market shifted. From there the conversation goes deep on team composition, why diverse backgrounds matter more than uniform credentials, and the mindset shift from object-oriented to functional programming. We also get into the practical side of Elixir: when GenServers are the right tool and when they're not, why vibe coding worries him from an engineering quality standpoint, and why teaching is actually a selfish act that benefits the teacher most. We close out with what separates a real staff engineer from a senior one, a call…
People in this episode
Host: Jacob Luetzow
Guest: Amos King
Topics covered
- mentorship
- knowledge sharing
- team dynamics
- software engineering
- Elixir programming
- functional programming
- database optimization
Keywords
- Elixir
- mentorship
- team composition
- functional programming
- GenServers
- database optimization
- software reliability
- consulting market
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Adobe, Binary Noggin
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