Director of Core Engineering

We are a young, fast-growing startup building cutting-edge technology to revolutionize cloud development processes and support highly efficient dev&test feedback loops. 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 (56k+ stars on GitHub) with several 100k active users worldwide and 280M+ downloads to date. With a growing international customer base across Fortune Global 500 companies for our advanced enterprise offerings, as well as a growing, globally distributed team of top-notch engineers and GTM experts, we are on an exciting growth journey to become the world’s leading platform for local cloud software development.

LocalStack is headquartered in Zurich/Switzerland, with a development office in Vienna/Austria and remote team members from around the world (incl. US, FR, UK, IN, IT, MX, IE).

We are looking for a dynamic and experienced Director of Core Engineering to lead and oversee the development of our core emulators, which are the critical foundation of our world-class cloud development platform. In our journey so far, our efforts have been mostly focused on building our flagship AWS emulator, which has achieved remarkable success with nearly 300 million pulls from Docker Hub by our global user community. As we continue our exciting growth journey, we have expanded our efforts to include the development of a local Snowflake emulator (currently in public preview) and an Azure emulator (in private alpha), which are generating strong early adoption and market traction.

This role is critical to LocalStack’s success, focusing on driving technical excellence, scaling our engineering capabilities, and delivering world-class developer tools to our global customer base. The incoming Director of Core Engineering will lead a team of exceptionally talented and motivated engineers who are at the forefront of developing some of the most advanced cloud emulator technology on the globe. Our engineering culture is built on a foundation of strong ownership, bottom-up innovation, and active cross-team collaboration - providing a solid base to achieve our ambitious growth targets and execute on our product roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Team Leadership and Growth:
• Oversee multiple engineering squads responsible for the development and delivery of our core emulators and related developer tooling.
• Scale the team from ~20 to 35+ members within the course of next year, focusing on hiring top talent to build a high-performing organization.
• Provide mentorship, career development, and foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Technical Oversight:
• Ensure timely and high-quality delivery of our core products, including the AWS, Azure, and Snowflake emulators.
• Collaborate with engineering leads to define technical roadmaps and ensure alignment with company objectives.
• Advocate for best practices in software development, testing, and DevOps automation to maintain our high standards of quality and reliability.
• Strategy and Execution:
• Define and implement metrics and KPIs to measure and improve team performance and product quality.
• Partner with product management to prioritize features and improvements based on customer needs and market trends.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration to ensure alignment between Engineering, Product, and Technical GTM / Customer Success teams.
• Innovation and Vision:
• Stay ahead of industry trends in cloud platforms and developer tooling, bringing innovative ideas to our core product offerings.
• Foster a strong culture of innovation within the organization, facilitating hackathons, innovation days, and a pipeline of incubation projects.
• Act as a thought leader, representing LocalStack’s engineering vision internally and externally.

Qualifications

• Experience:
• 8+ years of engineering leadership experience, with a proven track record of scaling and managing high-performing teams.
• Strong background in software engineering, preferably in the developer tools, cloud infrastructure, or database technology space.
• Skills:
• Expertise in leading multiple engineering squads (manager of managers) and managing complex projects with distributed teams.
• Deep technical understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Snowflake) and associated developer tooling.
• Strong analytical mindset, with experience establishing and tracking KPIs and metrics to drive performance.
• Leadership:
• Inspirational leader with excellent communication skills and the ability to attract and retain top-tier talent.
• Hands-on approach to problem-solving and willingness to dive into technical discussions whenever needed.

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.
• Opportunities for professional development and training.
• Dynamic and collaborative work environment.
• Flexible work arrangements.

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.

Interested?

If you're excited about the opportunity to lead and scale the core engineering team at LocalStack, we'd love to hear from you! Join us in shaping the future of cloud development at LocalStack.