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
Cloud Engineers
Most British companies are paying more for cloud than they need to and getting less resilience than they think. We embed cloud engineers across AWS, GCP and Azure who design for scale, security and cost in the same breath. They work your hours as our full-time employees, at 50 to 75% less than a comparable British hire.
- Proven across AWS, GCP and Azure
- Architecture that balances scale, security and spend
- Embedded in your DevOps workflow and working to your rhythm
AWSGoogle CloudAzureTerraformCloudFormation
Our Service
Vetted on architecture judgement, not badge count
Cloud certifications prove vocabulary, not judgement, and AI can now recite the vocabulary too. Our CTO-led vetting puts candidates through live pair programming and design discussion, because knowing when a queue, a cache or a simpler architecture is the right answer is what you are actually paying for. If a migration is not worth doing yet, our engineers will tell you.
- Matched to your provider, architecture and compliance needs
- Monitoring, security and cost discipline from the first week
- Comfortable working across product, DevOps and leadership
Cloud Expertise That Scales With You
Engineers who keep performance and resilience honest
- Infrastructure DesignArchitect fault-tolerant, secure, scalable cloud systems.
- Cloud MigrationsMove from on-prem or between cloud providers with minimal downtime.
- Cost OptimizationRight-size resources, manage billing, and cut unnecessary spend.
- High AvailabilityImplement failover, autoscaling, and multi-region redundancy.
- Security & ComplianceEnforce IAM, secrets management, and SOC2/ISO practices.
- Monitoring & ReliabilitySet up cloud-native dashboards, alerts & incident response systems.
Cloud Stacks We Support
AWS, GCP, Azure and the estates that span all three
Technology coverage
From your front end to your back end, we've got your stack handled.
Frequently placed for Cloud Engineers
AWS DevelopersCloud-native engineers on demand
Google Cloud DevelopersGCP infrastructure engineers on demand
Azure DevelopersCloud-native .NET & Azure engineers
Terraform DevelopersInfra as code engine
CloudFormation DevelopersAWS CloudFormation engineers, embedded in your team
Kubernetes DevelopersContainer orchestration
Ansible DevelopersAutomation-focused Ansible engineers, embedded
Prometheus DevelopersMetrics and alerting
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 Cloud Engineer · Cloud · Terraform · Kubernetes · 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 broken deployment 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.
Why Cloud Employee?
Infrastructure people who stay long enough to matter
Nobody should redesign your infrastructure and leave in six months. Ours do not, 97% stay beyond two years, backed by full employment and a 1,000 pound annual learning budget. Commercially it is one monthly fee, a rolling contract with 30 days notice, a two-week money-back guarantee with a free replacement, and a UK-based client success manager throughout.
- Fully embedded in your systems, tools and teams
- HR, retention and support carried by us as employer of record
- No upfront fees, and 30 days notice if priorities change
Scale Without Headaches
Contracts, compliance and support are ours, the platform is yours
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.
Can't find your question?
Ask our AI chatbot, trained on every sales call we've had.
01How much does it cost to hire a cloud engineer in the UK?
The saving is typically 50 to 75% against a comparable British hire once salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads are totalled. UK-based cloud engineers are absolutely something we place. What tends to decide it is the quality-to-cost ratio, which usually favours Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, and Eastern Europe in particular works well for British teams at about an hour from London. We are chasing the strongest quality-to-cost ratio we can find for clients, exceptional infrastructure people at a sustainable price.
02What is a cloud engineer and why do teams hire one?
A cloud engineer designs, builds and runs the infrastructure your software lives on, spanning cloud platforms, deployment pipelines, container orchestration, monitoring and the automation that ties them together. Teams hire one when infrastructure stops being a background task, usually around the point deployments get scary, costs get opaque or an outage exposes that nobody owns reliability. The role differs from a single-platform developer by breadth; the value is judgement across the whole system, choosing boring technology and wiring deployment paths developers actually enjoy using.
03What skills should I look for in a cloud engineer now?
Platform thinking beats tool collecting; the cloud engineer you want treats infrastructure as a product whose users are your developers, and measures success by how safely they can ship. Under that sit the concrete skills, infrastructure as code as a reflex, container orchestration where justified, observability that answers questions rather than decorating dashboards, and security defaults baked in rather than audited in later. Incident temperament matters as much as any of it; ask about the worst outage they owned and listen for calm specifics.
04How do I assess a cloud engineer, and what should I ask?
Ask them to design your deployment path from laptop to production, and judge the questions they ask before the answers they give; context-free architecture is a warning sign. Follow with an incident story told minute by minute, and a reliability trade-off they argued for and lost. Ask what they would remove from a typical stack, because restraint is rarer than capability in infrastructure. Have them review a pipeline or infrastructure change with AI tooling in the loop, and watch whether generated configuration gets the same scrutiny as a colleague's pull request.
05Are cloud engineers in demand, and is the role worth investing in?
Demand is broad and durable, because every company that ships software owns infrastructure somewhere, and reliability expectations only ever move upward. Whether the investment is worth it depends on stage. Once deployments carry fear, costs need explaining or customers notice your downtime, a dedicated cloud engineer usually pays for themselves in unblocked developer time alone. Before that point, honest advice is to wait, or share the responsibility across the team, since AI has made one strong engineer able to operate far more than before.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, and in infrastructure the stakes of that answer are higher than anywhere, because a wrong configuration change can take down everything the company runs. Our cloud engineers use AI assistants for drafting pipeline definitions, infrastructure code and runbooks, inside a discipline built for exactly this blast radius; every generated change is reviewed as seriously as a human one, tested against non-production environments, and shipped through the same controlled paths as any other change. We assess whether candidates use AI tooling well during vetting, watching the review habit specifically.
07How does Cloud Employee vet cloud engineers?
Cloud engineering candidates pass the same CTO-led bar as our developers, with the live pairing session run against realistic infrastructure scenarios alongside a senior engineer. A technical assessment, cultural fit screen and our psychometric assessment purpose-built for software engineers round out the process. We probe incident history, security instincts and the restraint to choose boring technology, because infrastructure rewards judgement over novelty, and we test how each candidate works with AI tools on configuration and code review.
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