Software engineer – aws

LocalStack - the Local Cloud Sandbox for Developers and AI Agents

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.

LocalStack is a local cloud development platform. LocalStack makes it easier, faster, and less expensive for software teams to ship reliable, high-quality applications to the cloud.

The cloud was built to run software, not to support AI-native development workflows. As the world's leading local cloud development platform, LocalStack provides secure local sandboxes that simulate cloud environments, enabling AI agents and software developers to find and fix risks faster and more effectively than they can in the cloud.

Our customer base ranges from SMBs to Global Fortune 500 companies. Our clients include companies like NASA, Harness, IBM, Workday, Comcast, Apple, 3M, Block and many more.

We are sustainably growing our globally distributed teams across GTM, operations and engineering. In 2025 we almost doubled in size and continue to grow across all areas in 2026.

LocalStack is headquartered in Zurich/Switzerland 🇨🇭, with a small engineering office in Vienna/Austria 🇦🇹 and remote team members from 25 countries including 🇺🇸the US, 🇫🇷FR, 🇬🇧UK, 🇨🇦CA, 🇪🇸ES, and many more!

👉Check our Notion Candidate Handbook and our GitHub!

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the AWS Emulator team, you’ll help expand and harden LocalStack’s AWS emulator by taking ownership of individual services and making them behave as closely as possible to real AWS.

The challenge is genuinely unusual: you’ll reimplement cloud services that you can only observe from the outside. Making a service “work” is one thing; matching AWS behaviour — including edge cases and undocumented details — is a very different engineering problem.

We’re looking for someone who learns quickly, enjoys tackling unfamiliar problems, and can turn incomplete information into working solutions. You’ll have end-to-end ownership of your services, from investigating how they behave and deciding what needs to be built through implementation, testing, and ongoing improvements.

AI is a core part of how the team works. You’ll use modern AI coding and agentic tools to make development more efficient while maintaining the quality and reliability expected by LocalStack users. The role offers a clear path to broader service ownership and technical leadership as your scope grows.

What you will be working on/responsible for

• Internalize services off moto. Independently take AWS services from moto-backed to fully first-party implementations, owning store design for persistence, full API operation coverage, and conformance to LocalStack conventions rather than transplanted moto code. Measured by services shipped and their size.
• Close parity gaps in owned services. Raise snapshot-test coverage against real AWS for the documented API surface for owned services, with a measurable reduction in parity defects reported from the field.
• Own services end-to-end after they ship. Act as first responder for their services: customer-reported parity bugs triaged and turned around within 5 days median, including those that surface through Terraform and CDK rather than direct API calls.
• Raise the team's testing floor. Contribute reusable test infrastructure (conformance harnesses, snapshot tooling, fixtures) that other engineers adopt for services they do not own.
• Grow visibly in scope. By month 12, be trusted to scope and sequence an internalization independently, from API-documentation analysis through to shipped provider, without needing the plan handed to them.

Experience we expect you to bring to the role

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong engineering fundamentals. We’re language-agnostic — prior Python experience is not required.
• Experience working from a written specification against a system you cannot see inside, such as public APIs, protocols, wire formats, parsers, compilers, SDKs, emulators, or reverse-engineering projects.
• A strong testing mindset — you use tests as a tool for understanding and designing systems, not just for checking finished code.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding and agentic development tools. We’re looking for more than basic Copilot usage: you should have used these tools substantially to build and ship real software and understand both their strengths and limitations.
• Fast learning and strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to quickly understand unfamiliar systems and work effectively with incomplete information.

Strong Plus

• Open-source contribution experience, particularly sustained involvement in an existing project.
• Experience working with AWS, at either application or platform level.
• Experience with distributed systems, storage, or protocol conformance.

Nice to Have

• Deep AWS expertise.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi.
• Experience with Kubernetes and microservices architecture.

Values we hold in LocalStack

• Care: we create with compassion. We prioritize empathy and understanding in every interaction. By genuinely caring for our team, customers, and community, we create an environment where people thrive and impactful work flourishes.
• Ownership: we own the outcome. We take responsibility for our work and are passionate about its impact. We foster autonomy, inspire ambition, encourage ownership, and empower everyone to unlock their potential and make an impact.
• Openness: we build trust together. We build trust through open communication and honest feedback. By sharing ideas and embracing diverse perspectives, we create stronger, more connected teams that work toward shared goals.
• Courage: we dare to innovate. We embrace bold challenges and take calculated risks to move the needle. We step outside our comfort zones, experiment fearlessly, and turn setbacks into springboards for growth.
• Excellence: we chase the extraordinary. We chase excellence by pushing boundaries and delivering results that go beyond the ordinary, constantly raising the bar and striving for greatness in everything we do. Excellence is not just the outcome, itʼs how we approach every task with purpose, passion, and a commitment to delivering exceptional value.

Benefits

• Fully remote
• Competitive salary
• Annual company retreat
• 2 extra company-wide holidays
• Friendly and inclusive workplace culture (community guilds and online company events)
• Yearly bonus

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 application process. 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, our talent team 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.