Senior Software Engineer - Database Internals

Who we are

We are a fast-growing Series A startup building cutting-edge technology to revolutionize cloud development processes and support highly efficient dev&test feedback loops. We’ve closed our last $25mil round in Q4 2024, led by Notable Capital, CRV and Heavybit.

At its core, LocalStack provides a high-fidelity emulator and local cloud development platform. Imagine developing cloud applications and data pipelines entirely on your local machine within a lightweight cloud sandbox, running in Docker!

Our mission is to empower developers to rapidly build and test their cloud applications, allowing for a more enjoyable dev experience, and saving valuable time and resources.

LocalStack has a large and active open-source community (57k+ stars on GitHub) with over 100k active users worldwide and 290M+ downloads to date. Our customer base ranges from SMBs to Global Fortune 500 companies.

We are sustainably growing our globally distributed team across sectors

LocalStack is headquartered in Zurich/Switzerland 🇨🇭, with a main engineering office in Vienna/Austria 🇦🇹 and remote team members from 🇺🇸the US, 🇫🇷FR, 🇬🇧UK, 🇨🇦CA, 🇪🇸ES, and many more countries.

👉Check our Notion Candidate Handbook and our GitHub!

This role is ideal for someone with 5+ years of software engineering experience, strong API design skills, and solid backend expertise. You’ll work on Snowflake and AWS big data emulators, building features and ensuring high-fidelity cloud platform emulation to help developers test locally with speed and confidence.

✅ What you will be working on/responsible for

• Ensure Snowflake, Redshift, Athena, Glue, and future emulators are kept up to date with the latest syntax, behaviors, and APIs.
• Identify and resolve bugs, edge cases, and inconsistencies across emulated services.
• Maintain robust CI/CD pipelines, regression test coverage, and integration test suites for high-fidelity emulation.
• Provide a fast and intuitive local development loop with meaningful error messages, good performance, and easy configuration.
• Improve emulator usability in CLI tools, SDKs, and client integrations (e.g., JDBC, SnowSQL, 3rd part integrations).
• Design and implement support for additional data platform features, services, and cloud providers (e.g. Azure Synapse, BigQuery).
• Track cloud service evolution and update emulators to reflect new capabilities or changes.
• Build abstractions that make it easy to plug in new service behaviour or data models.
• Ensure emulators work seamlessly with orchestration and infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., dbt, Terraform, Airflow, CDKs).
• Gather and act on feedback from internal and external teams to prioritize high-impact integrations.
• Build usage analytics and telemetry to understand adoption patterns and developer needs.
• Maintain high code quality, clear architecture, and extensibility to support contributions and experimentation.

✅ Experience we expect you to bring to the role

• 5+ years (senior) of professional experience in backend or systems engineering, ideally within the database domain.
• Strong understanding of modern databases and data warehouses, including SQL engines, query planning, storage layers, indexing, and SQL parsing/ASTs, with experience developing database features.
• Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Redshift, Athena, or BigQuery, including optimization techniques and custom parsers/transpilers.
• Practical knowledge of distributed and analytical engines (e.g., Apache Spark, Trino, PostgreSQL, DuckDB) with skills in query engines, performance tuning, and integration in local and production environments.
• Experience building developer tooling such as CLI tools, SDKs, and database drivers (JDBC/ODBC) or related integrations.
• Proficiency in writing integration and regression tests, maintaining CI/CD pipelines, and automating test scenarios for complex data workflows.
• Familiarity with Docker-based development environments (Docker & Docker Compose), containerized services for local testing, and container networking; Kubernetes experience is a plus.
• Experience with at least one major public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), ideally working with big data or database services.
• Strong programming skills in Python (Java a plus); familiarity with TypeScript or Go is (nice to have.)
• Experience contributing to open source or working with communities to gather feedback, triage issues, and guide contributors. (Nice to have)

• Fully remote
• Competitive salary
• Performance bonus
• Competitive share options
• Annual company retreat
• Learning budget

Why Join LocalStack?

At LocalStack, we are at the forefront of shaping cloud DevX and redefining how developers interact with cloud platforms. By joining our team, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Lead a critical engineering function in a fast-growing company with huge open source traction and global customer base.
• Work on cutting-edge technology with a talented and passionate team.
• Shape the evolution of a product used and loved by thousands of developers worldwide.

Sounds like a good match?

We'd love to hear from you! Join us in shaping the future of cloud development at LocalStack.

To apply, follow the LI application process or apply on our career page. Make sure to include a short motivation outlining why you are the perfect candidate for this role.

We aim to come back to applicants within 2 weeks. Please note, that due to a high volume of candidates, we cannot offer personalized feedback to each candidate.