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
DevOps Engineers
When deployments are manual and fragile, every release costs a British working day and more courage than it should. We embed DevOps engineers who automate the pipeline, put infrastructure into code and make releases uneventful. They work your hours as our full-time employees, at 50 to 75% below the fully loaded cost of a comparable British hire.
- CI/CD, containers, cloud and automation as standard
- Repeatable build, test and deploy instead of tribal knowledge
- Inside your delivery process, not watching from a ticket queue
AWSGoogle CloudAzureDockerKubernetes
Our Service
Engineers who serve the developers, not just the servers
The best DevOps work is measured in how fast everyone else ships. Our engineers pair with your developers, tighten feedback loops and build observability you can act on. They pass CTO-led vetting with live pair programming, because good platform judgement, knowing what to automate and what to leave alone, cannot be read off a certification list.
- Woven into your CI/CD and sprint cadence from the start
- Cloud, containers, pipelines and monitoring in one skill set
- Infrastructure as code your auditors and engineers both accept
Infrastructure & Delivery
Engineers who cut friction and compound your velocity
- CI/CD PipelinesAutomate builds, tests, and deploys using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI & more.
- Cloud InfrastructureSet up and manage scalable systems on AWS, GCP, Azure.
- ContainerizationUse Docker and Kubernetes to ensure consistent, flexible deployments
- Observability & MonitoringImplement logs, alerts, and dashboards with tools like Grafana, Datadog, and Prometheus.
- Security & ComplianceManage secrets, access control, and secure deployment practices.
- Infrastructure-as-CodeUse Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation for reproducible infra.
Tools That Power DevOps
Your pipeline, your cloud and your monitoring stack, matched
Technology coverage
From your front end to your back end, we've got your stack handled.
Frequently placed for DevOps Engineers
AWS DevelopersCloud-native engineers on demand
Google Cloud DevelopersGCP infrastructure engineers on demand
Azure DevelopersCloud-native .NET & Azure engineers
Docker DevelopersApp containerization
Kubernetes DevelopersContainer orchestration
Terraform DevelopersInfra as code engine
GitHub Actions DevelopersGitHub CI/CD workflows
Prometheus DevelopersMetrics and alerting
GitLab CI DevelopersGitLab CI pipelines
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 DevOps Engineer · Kubernetes · Terraform · CI/CD · 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.
Ask our AI anythingWhy Cloud Employee?
Platform knowledge that does not walk out of the door
DevOps is where institutional knowledge concentrates, which makes churn in the role uniquely painful. Our engineers stay, 97% beyond two years, supported by full employment and a 1,000 pound annual learning budget. The commercial side is simple, one monthly fee, a rolling contract, 30 days notice, no placement charge, and a UK-based client success manager to call.
- Embedded in your stack, tools and release rhythm
- Employer of record, so contractor IR35 questions never arise
- Flex the engagement up or down as the platform work demands
Ops That Empower Devs
Admin and HR sit with us, uptime and velocity sit with your team
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 a DevOps engineer in the UK?
Expect to pay 50 to 75% less than an equivalent British hire when salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads are added up. Hiring a UK-based DevOps engineer through us is perfectly possible. It is simply that the quality-to-cost ratio usually points to Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, and for a British team Eastern Europe is the strongest of the three at about an hour ahead of London. The aim is the strongest quality-to-cost ratio available, excellent engineers at a sustainable price.
02What does a DevOps engineer actually do, and why hire one?
A DevOps engineer builds and runs the machinery that gets code from a laptop into production safely, then keeps it running. In practice that means CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, cloud environments, monitoring and incident response. Teams hire one when releases have become slow or frightening, when cloud bills are drifting upward, or when one person leaving would take all the deployment knowledge with them. DevOps is a practice rather than a tool, so the value is in judgement about trade-offs, such as speed against safety and cost against resilience.
03What skills should I look for in a DevOps engineer now?
Prioritise engineers who treat infrastructure as a system to be designed, not a pile of scripts to be patched. The floor is solid Linux, networking, one major cloud, Terraform or similar, and containers. The differentiator now is judgement, because AI assistants will happily generate Terraform and Kubernetes manifests that look right and fail in production, so you need someone who reviews generated configuration as critically as handwritten code. Look for security instincts, cost awareness, and observability habits, meaning they instrument systems before things break.
04How do I assess a DevOps engineer, and what should I ask?
Assess a DevOps engineer on a real failure scenario, not on trivia about flags and commands. Walk them through an outage like one you have actually had and ask what they would check first, what they would roll back, and what they would change afterwards. Ask them to review a Terraform module or pipeline with deliberate problems, including one an AI assistant would plausibly generate, and see what they catch. Let them use AI tooling during the exercise and watch the verification habit, because generated infrastructure code that nobody checks is how quiet disasters ship.
05Are DevOps engineers in demand, and is the investment worth it?
Demand for DevOps engineers remains strong and is broadening, because every team that ships software needs the discipline, whatever the job title says. Cloud spend keeps rising, systems keep getting more distributed, and AI-assisted development is increasing the volume of code reaching production, which puts more weight on the pipelines and guardrails around it. The skills also age well, since the underlying concerns, reliability, security, cost and speed of change, do not go out of fashion even as tools churn. A seed-stage product on a single managed platform may not need one yet.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, they use AI tools, and infrastructure is exactly where unverified AI output is most dangerous, so verification is the habit we vet hardest. A wrong Terraform block can expose a database or delete one, which is why our engineers treat generated configuration as a draft to be reviewed, tested in a plan stage and promoted through environments, never applied blind. During vetting we assess whether candidates use AI tooling well, and the live pair programming session with a senior engineer shows us whether they can explain and defend everything they ship.
07How does Cloud Employee vet DevOps engineers?
Our vetting is led by CTOs, not recruiters, so DevOps candidates are judged by people who have run production systems themselves. The process has four stages, a technical assessment, live pair programming with a senior engineer, a cultural fit screen, and a psychometric assessment we designed for software engineers. For this role the pairing tends toward infrastructure scenarios, debugging a broken pipeline or reasoning about a failing deployment, because talking about reliability is easy and demonstrating it is not.
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