Our new developers were able to hit the ground running, we've worked with them for over two years now, and they are truly part of our team.
Alison WhittleProduct Delivery Manager, BladeFSIn-house feel, nearshore
AI Consulting
British boards are demanding an AI strategy, and much of what gets sold in response is theatre. Our consulting starts from your workflows and data, names the use cases where AI genuinely pays, and is equally willing to conclude that a rules engine or a better process would serve you better. The output is a path to action, not a deck.
- Real opportunities separated from expensive novelty
- AI placed where it changes a number you care about
- Scope, stack and team guidance ready to execute
OpenAILangChainHuggingFacePythonTypeScript
Our Service
Strategy written by people who ship AI for a living
We practise what we advise. Cloud Employee uses AI inside its own hiring while keeping every final decision human, and our consultants are engineers who have carried models into production. That experience shapes the advice, which models to trust, where the data will fight you, and what the team must look like to sustain it.
- Model and use-case mapping with reasons, not fashion
- Architecture and data planning fit for your estate
- A team and build plan you can act on immediately
Strategy That Leads to Shipping
What the engagement leaves you ready to do
- Use Case AssessmentClear view of where AI adds real user or business value in your product.
- Model RecommendationsGuidance on LLMs, open-source, hosted models, and when to fine-tune.
- Data & Infra OverviewRequirements for data pipelines, vector search, and ML ops tools.
- Feature-Level PlanWhich AI features to prioritize and how they integrate with your app.
- Team & Build NeedsDev, data, and infra expertise needed to deliver and iterate.
- Risk & Cost OutlookTransparent view of feasibility, effort, and model/runtime costs.
We Speak AI
Frontier APIs to open-source models, judged on your use case
Technology coverage
From your front end to your back end, we've got your stack handled.
Frequently placed for AI Consulting
OpenAI DevelopersLLM-powered product specialists
LangChain DevelopersEmbedded LLM engineers
HuggingFace DevelopersNLP, transformers & model fine-tuning
Python DevelopersBackend, data, and automation specialists
TypeScript DevelopersTyped safety meets modern JavaScript
Pinecone DevelopersVector search specialists
LlamaIndex DevelopersRAG app specialists
Vertex AI DevelopersGoogle-native AI expertise
Weaviate DevelopersVector-native app builders
PostHog DevelopersProduct analytics engineers
Vetting
You see two people - not 200 CVs.
Engineers vet engineers
A senior engineer runs a live technical conversation on the candidate's real stack, not a recruiter working from a keyword list.
Live coding, not take-homes
Real problems solved in front of an assessor, with anti-cheating checks. You see how they actually work, not what they submitted overnight.
A full profile, not a CV
Every candidate arrives with a CV, interview summary, coding-test breakdown and rate in pounds. You decide on evidence.
Every tab is a stage a candidate has to clear. Six of them, all run by our own internal engineers at Cloud Employee, before you see a name.
- Overview
- CV
- Tech interview
- Coding test
- Psychometric
- Soft skills
Scored by people. We use AI to cross-check our own consistency - never to decide who reaches your shortlist.
✓Luka M.
VettedSenior AI Engineer · Python · LLM systems · RAG · 6 yrs · Zagreb, Croatia (GMT+1)
Assessment
Six years in production Python, the last three on LLM systems - retrieval pipelines, eval suites, and agent tooling for UK fintech. Owns delivery end to end.
Stack
Python · LangGraph
English
C1 fluent
Overlap
8 hrs UK
Notice
2 weeks
AI in practiceShips with Copilot and Claude Code daily, and rewrote 40% of the generated code in his observed task - the judgement is his, the tooling only makes him faster.
Career history
2023 - now
Senior AI Engineer
UK payments platform · 40-person product team
Built the retrieval assistant now resolving 30% of tier-1 tickets; owns its eval suite and guardrails.
2020 - 2023
Backend Engineer, Python
Travel booking SaaS · Zagreb
Moved fraud scoring onto a real-time feature pipeline; cut false declines by 18%.
2019 - 2020
Data Engineer
Agency · Python, Postgres, AWS
- Python
- FastAPI
- LangGraph
- pgvector
- Evals & tracing
- AWS
- Docker
Technical interview
Assessed by Marco R., Principal Engineer
12 Jun 2026
55 min · live call
"Walked me through an assistant that was quietly hallucinating refund policy, how he caught it in evals, and what he got wrong on the first fix. Hire-ready for a senior seat."
Live coding test
Repair a leaking retrieval pipeline
88
score
Tests passed
21 / 21
Time used
62 of 90 min
Anti-cheat flags
0
retrieval.py · submitted diff
- hits = index.query(q, k=50)+ hits = index.query(rewrite(q), k=50, filter=tenant)+ hits = rerank(hits, q)[:8] # recall 0.62 -> 0.91+ assert_context_budget(hits, max_tokens=6000)
Psychometric · technical thinking
How he reasons under a real deadline - not a personality quiz.
Top 9%of engineers
we test
A 45-minute reasoning test, scored against the 4,000+ engineers we have already placed. Our assessors do the marking - AI only flags where our own scoring looks inconsistent.
Soft skills · working with your team
Spoken English
C1 · assessed on call
References
2 of 2 verified
"He raised the payment edge case nobody else had spotted, in writing, two days before release."
This is what you receive - not a CV.
Ask our AI anythingWhy Cloud Employee?
Consultants with skin in the delivery
Advice is cheap when the adviser never has to build it. Ours do. The same organisation that writes your AI plan can embed the engineers to deliver it, vetted through CTO-led assessment and available to interview within 7 working days, at 50 to 75% less than comparable British hires. That possibility keeps the plan honest even if you never use it.
- Grounded in shipped AI products, not slideware
- Planning led by engineers rather than generalists
- A route from recommendation to build inside one engagement
Not Just Developers - A Whole Operation
Talent, technical and success teams from the first workshop
Fully supported
We handle the rest so your engineers can focus on building.
Performance reviews
Payroll & complianceEquipment
WorkspaceIn-house, without the friction
No upfront fees. No lock-in contracts.
- No placement or upfront fees
- Rolling 30-day contract, cancel anytime
- One monthly rate, everything included
Ready to find your engineer?
Tell us exactly who you need.
In 90 seconds
Two matched engineers in 7 days. No fees, no obligation.
Any particular stack?
Optional. Search anything, and add it if it is not listed.
Popular right now
- Founded in 2014
- 97% stay 2+ years
- Replace if it isn't working
Got questions?
The questions CTOs and founders ask.
01How much does it cost to hire an AI consultant in the UK?
Usually between 50 and 75% below the full cost of a comparable British hire, once salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads are all counted. We place UK-based AI consultants, though most clients choose Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America instead, since quality matches and cost does not, with Eastern Europe suiting British teams well at roughly an hour from London. The aim is the strongest quality-to-cost ratio available, exceptional advice at a sustainable price. AI consulting carries a premium in Britain because credible, hands-on strategy experience is scarce.
02What is AI consulting and why do teams choose it?
AI consulting is the work of deciding where AI genuinely belongs in your business, and just as importantly where it does not, before serious money gets spent. It covers feasibility, whether your data can support what you imagine, build-versus-buy judgement, model and vendor selection, cost modelling and the governance questions that arrive once AI touches customers. Teams bring in a consultant because the field moves faster than any internal generalist can track, and vendor claims need an independent, technically fluent sceptic. Consulting produces clarity, not software; if you know what to build, hire engineers instead.
03What skills should I look for in an AI consultant now?
Shipping history and scepticism, together; the consultant worth hiring has built AI systems that reached production and can tell you which of their own past projects should never have been started. Look for evaluation literacy, insisting on defining what good output looks like before anything is built, fluency in the economics of tokens, latency and hosting, and data judgement to spot that the real blocker is data quality rather than model choice. They should use AI heavily in their own work, showing where human judgement overruled the tool. Beware fluent slide-makers with no production scars.
04How do I assess an AI consultant, and what should I ask?
Ask them to tell you about an AI project they advised killing, and why; consultants who have never recommended against a build are salespeople with better vocabulary. A good consultant should start asking about your data, your users and what failure would cost, rather than reaching for a framework. Ask how they would measure success on a project you have in mind, and listen for evaluation thinking rather than enthusiasm. It is reasonable to expect them to use AI tools fluently in front of you; their craft is judgement about these systems.
05Are AI consultants in demand, and is it worth investing in one?
Demand is intense and the market is noisy, which is exactly the combination that produces expensive mistakes. Every board wants an AI answer, so consulting supply has ballooned faster than genuine expertise, and the buyer's problem is telling them apart. If you face a real decision, a build, a vendor selection, a data strategy, then yes, because the cost of a wrong turn dwarfs the fee. If nothing concrete is on the table, an engagement will manufacture recommendations to justify itself, and a small internal experiment usually serves better first.
06Do your consultants use AI tools, and how do you know the work is sound?
Constantly, and for a consultant that is close to a professional obligation, since advising on tools you do not use daily produces advice that ages in weeks. Our consultants prototype with AI, analyse with it and pressure-test vendor claims against hands-on experience rather than documentation. Soundness comes from the discipline around it; recommendations are grounded in evaluations you can rerun, prototypes are built to be measured rather than admired, and anything AI-drafted is reviewed by the person whose name is on it.
07How does Cloud Employee vet AI consultants?
The same CTO-led process every engineer faces, with extra weight on production evidence, because AI consulting attracts more confident talkers than any field we hire for. Candidates go through a technical assessment, live pair programming with a senior engineer on a realistic problem, a cultural fit screen and a psychometric assessment we built for software engineers. We push for specifics on systems that shipped, what was measured and what they would refuse to build again. How they use AI tooling is assessed directly.
08How quickly can a developer start, and how does the engagement work?
You are typically interviewing matched candidates within 7 working days of a requirements call, and developers are often embedded and pushing code within about two weeks. From there it is a rolling monthly contract with 30 days' notice, one monthly fee, and no placement charges. You can scale up or down as the work changes, and you pay nothing to interview.
09What happens if the developer is not the right fit?
There is a two-week money-back guarantee, and if you want to continue we replace the developer free of charge. In practice this rarely comes up, because you interview a shortlist of two candidates who have already passed a CTO-led technical assessment and a live pair programming session, so the fit question is largely settled before anyone starts.
Proof, not promises
Hear from our customers
In their words
What the difference feels like
Alison WhittleProduct Delivery Manager, BladeFSWhat I love about Cloud Employee is that you have taken all of that hard work off my shoulders.
Marcus KilgourCTO, Salmon SoftwareWorking with Cloud Employee developers is great, because they're not afraid to push back. They're proactive, they're positive, and they feel like part of the team.
Doran EskinaziHead of Engineering, HealthpointeWe actually hired the whole team remotely, having never met them. And we made a bunch of really good hires.
Euan CameronCEO, WilloCloud Employee provides a level of professionalism, communication and support we haven't found elsewhere.
Trevor SathorManaging Director, Square EyeWorking in tandem with Cloud Employee we have successfully released a major version of our main software product during a critical period for us.
James StringerManaging Director, CleanLink