I’ve been paid to work on Common Lisp projects for a company for three months already. I didn’t expect it :) And we did hire !
My Github profile shows a good part of what my experience is. I am a regular “full stack developper”, with 7 years of professional experience. I worked on diverse Python and Javascript projects for huge to small companies, private and public. When I re-discovered Common Lisp, I saw it solved a lot of problems I had developing and deploying medium to large software, and it promised to solve all of them (we’re nearly there :D ). I started to write about my experience on this blog and I contributed to open source projects, of which a lot of documentation effort. It is this public activity that drew the attention of the guys at Atlas, who contacted me, without a job announce. We developed and we maintain a proprietary and successful web application that paid the bills, in Common Lisp of course, and we work hard on other projects, such as the Next browser.
So, I can only encourage you to start a Common Lisp project, to come enhance libraries and documentation and to write about it ! There are few official job announces, some are posted on reddit, and some jobs just won’t have a public announce. You’d better be ready.
For the curious, our web app is rather classic, it uses the Caveman web framework and is deployed on DigitalOcean. We do deploy with zero downtime, as CL permits, for trivial updates (we are more cautious otherwise). I’ll post its name in the comments if/when I know I can.
Happy lisping.