This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Workshop on Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms 2009, held in Brussels, Belgium, September 3-5, 2009. The 7 revised full papers presented together with 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 27 submissions. The topics include e. g. the use of run time distributions to evaluate and compare, high- performance local search for task scheduling with human, running time analysis of ACO Systems for shortest path problems, the explorative behavior of MAX-MIN ant system and improved robustness through population variance and colony optimization.