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Direct hire - United Kingdom

Hire UK engineers
vetted by engineers

Permanent hires, on your payroll. On average you interview two, and hire one. All candidates interviewed by our senior engineers.

Start a searchHow it works
  • 2 matched profiles, not 200 CVs
  • A senior engineer interviews every candidate
  • Pay placement fee over 12 months
YOUR SHORTLIST2 profiles
Senior AI Engineer
Manchester · 9 yrs
  • Go
  • Postgres
  • AWS
  • Kafka
£80,000base sought
Senior Full-Stack Engineer
London · 7 yrs
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Node
  • GraphQL
£75,000base sought

Each profile ships with a written report on why they fit.

Illustrative

TRUSTED BY 300+ENGINEERING TEAMS

Virgin Experience Days
Salmon
Hotelplan
Willo
Travelex
Tidal
Scorpion
Vector
Virgin Experience Days
Salmon
Hotelplan
Willo
Travelex
Tidal
Scorpion
Vector
Ask our AI anything
State of the hiring market

More applicants
Harder to find the right
engineer.

+412% Job applications per role since 2023

We don't post jobs and wait for applicants. We headhunt every role, then a senior engineer runs a live coding interview before you see a candidate. You get 2 matched profiles in 7 days.

WHAT A JOB POST GETS YOU
Senior Backend Engineer
Interviewed by a senior engineer
Senior Full-Stack Engineer
Interviewed by a senior engineer
WHAT WE SEND
The process

How it works - from your side.

01The brief

Tell us what you need

And one of our UK based Account Managers will help you build out the profile that will fit not just your technical needs but will thrive in your company culture.

A senior engineer signs it off before we search.

Twenty minutes. Then we go.
THE BRIEF
Senior AI Engineer
  • Python, RAG, LLM APIs
  • 5+ years commercial experience
  • Has actually shipped AI to production
  • Figures things out without being handheld
  • Will tell me when I'm wrong - and propose something better

The first two, any recruiter can match. The rest is why a person takes the brief.

Anto, a Cloud Employee CTO, who scopes the brief on the intake call
CTO INTAKE CALL
02We interview

Live coding session interviews

Live pair programming on a real problem from your stack. Not an algorithm puzzle. Not a take-home they can hand to an AI.

You can't fake the answer to a follow-up.

100+ sourced. Two make it through.
pair-session · your stackLIVE
A senior Cloud Employee engineer on a live pair-programming callCE engineer
A candidate engineer on the same live pair-programming callCandidate
03On average:

You interview two. You hire one.

Both arrive with a detailed write-up from the engineer that interviewed them.

Technical people should hire technical people

You decide. We handle scheduling, the offer, etc.
Senior AI Engineer
Manchester · 9 yrs · Python, RAG, AWS
Open report
Coding test88%
InterviewStrong
Culture fitGood

Worth knowing: short tenure in last role. Moving due to wanting to work on something more challenging.

The funnel, in numbers
Initial headhunting pool100+
After CV & AI screening~40
After technical interview~15
After live coding interview~6
You interview both. You hire one.2
Engineers should hire engineers

We do what a recruiter can't do

We've been vetting senior engineers for companies since 2014. This is our proven process.

A senior engineer ran the interview

Live pair programming on a real problem, not a keyword match against a job description. You get their name and their notes.

A written report on both finalists

Why they fit your company and how they work. A candidate with no blind-spots listed just means nobody looked properly.

Start a search

Tell us who you're looking for

Four short steps. A senior engineer reads every one, and it does not go into a CRM.

THE ROLEStep 1 of 4

Start with what you've got

Say it instead

One file, or a few lines. Whatever you have is enough to start.

So we can save your brief and send you the market read for this role.

Saved as you go - finish anytime.

WE'LL COME BACK WITH WHAT YOUR SPEC DIDN'T SAY

Questions

The questions founders and CTOs actually ask.

Not answered here?

Ask our AI chatbot, trained on every sales call we've had.

Open chat

They do, and you read all ten. Two is what is left after we headhunt 100+ UK engineers, run a coding assessment on your stack, put the finalists through a live pair-programming session with a senior engineer, and get a CTO sign-off. Anyone who did not survive that is not a candidate, they are a CV. If neither of the two is right we go again at no extra cost. The fee is for the hire, not the shortlist.

Every direct hire carries a six-month replacement guarantee. If the engineer leaves or the fit is wrong, we run the search again at no extra cost, with the same headhunting, the same coding assessment and the same live interview. You keep the market read and both written reports either way.

We ask about money, notice and reasons for leaving in the first conversation, then again the week they resign, so a counteroffer rarely arrives as a surprise. UK notice periods are long enough that a lot can change in three months, so we stay close to the engineer the whole way through, not just to the signature. If a counteroffer still wins, it is treated like any other failed hire and we go again.

Contingency recruiters forward CVs that match keywords. We headhunt for the role across the UK market, then a senior engineer runs a live technical interview on a real problem from your stack before you see anyone. What lands in your inbox is two engineers and two written reports, not ten profiles for you to screen.

A senior engineer on our team, and you get their name. The write-up you receive is theirs: what they asked, how the engineer reasoned, where they are strong and where they are a stretch. A CTO signs the brief off before we search and signs off the shortlist before it reaches you.

There is no take-home to outsource. It is a live session on camera, on a problem from a real codebase, and the interviewer keeps asking why: why a queue, why that batch size, what breaks at ten times the traffic. AI can write the first answer. It cannot survive the third follow-up.

No. Anyone we place with you is off-limits to us, in writing, for as long as they work for you. That is a clause in the agreement, not a promise on a web page. Our business runs on repeat searches, not on recycling engineers we already placed.

Twenty minutes to scope the brief with a senior engineer, then two matched profiles in seven days. Most UK searches close inside three to four weeks once your own interviews, offer and acceptance are counted, then a one to three month notice period before they start. You get a written update every week the search is open, news or not.

Yes. Same process, same senior-engineer interview, priced and contracted for the US market. Plenty of clients run a UK search and a US search side by side off one brief. If you are hiring outside both, ask us and we will tell you honestly whether we can headhunt that market.