This sounds like a great fit for the Nerves project. It focuses on Elixir, which runs the same as Erlang.

It builds firmware for Pis and other IoT on top of a thin Buildroot Linux layer, starts the Erlang VM and then that's practically your OS for building your device. Plenty of escape hatches for special needs.

I've done a bunch of streams recently with clustering Pi devices using Nerves, especially fun on local network with mDNS. They are on my blog: https://underjord.io/blog.html

Feel free to reach out if you have questions about Nerves. I'm an enthusiast of it, contributing mostly by using it for fun in public. Also write the newsletter so I'm fairly up to date :)

A lot of devs find Elixir more approachable/familiar than Erlang so it might help in your case there as well.