Senior Software Engineer (Systems Engineering)

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.

This is the right opportunity for a person with over 5+ years in systems or backend engineering roles, experience in building low-level runtime systems for containerized environments, a strong background in API design and build, as well as a strong background in cloud-native technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

✅ What you will be working on/responsible for

• 5+ years of experience in systems engineering, backend development, or a similar low-level technical role.

• Proven experience developing and maintaining container-based runtime systems (e.g., Docker), with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and cross-environment portability.
• Solid understanding of container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, and experience building tooling or infrastructure to support complex deployments.
• Strong software engineering skills with proficiency in Python (or similar languages), and experience designing well-structured APIs and system architectures.
• Familiarity with benchmarking, profiling, and optimizing distributed systems at the emulator or runtime level.
• Hands-on experience contributing to or maintaining Open Source projects, with a collaborative and community-first mindset.
• Comfortable taking ownership of core infrastructure components and driving projects from idea to delivery.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work closely with product teams and customers to resolve technical challenges.
• Experience mentoring engineers, giving feedback, and helping build a high-performing engineering culture.
• A proactive attitude and eagerness to work in a fast-paced startup environment, continuously improving developer experience and cloud emulation capabilities.

✅ Experience we expect you to bring to the role

• 5+ years of professional experience in software development, with a strong foundation in designing, building, and maintaining complex systems.
• Proficiency in systems-level languages such as Rust, C, or C++, and/or high-level languages like Python.
• Deep understanding of Linux system APIs and internals, including networking, namespaces, and tracing mechanisms.
• Hands-on experience with advanced debugging and observability tools such as perf, eBPF, strace, and similar.
• Proven ability to debug and trace application behavior in complex containerized setups (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), addressing issues like crashes, networking, resource constraints, and permission errors.
• Familiarity with both application-level and platform-level cloud development, as well as Infrastructure-as-Code tools like AWS CDK, Terraform, or Pulumi.
• Experience in coaching and mentoring engineers, fostering a culture of learning and technical excellence.
• Exposure to working across Engineering, Developer Relations, and Go-to-Market teams to align on product goals and delivery. (Nice to have)
• Experience interfacing directly with customers to gather requirements, troubleshoot issues, and deliver technical solutions.
• Background in team or technical leadership, including ownership of critical projects and architectural decision-making. (Nice to have)

• Fully remote
• Competitive salary
• Opportunities for professional development and training.
• Dynamic and collaborative work environment.
• Flexible work arrangements.

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.

If your profile looks like a good match we will be in touch to organize further steps within 2 weeks.

Please note, that due to a high volume of candidates, we cannot offer personalized feedback to each candidate.