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
AWS Developers
AWS engineers working British hours alongside your existing team. The first question we ask is whether you need an application engineer who deploys to AWS or an infrastructure engineer who designs the account, because hiring the wrong one is the usual mistake.
- Terraform or CloudFormation, not console-only
- Comfortable embedding in an established platform team
- Working your hours and fully embedded
Infrastructure as CodeDevOps & CI/CDSecurity & IAMMonitoring & AlertsMigration Support
Our service
Cloud engineers embedded in your UK team
Infrastructure that exists only as clicks someone made once is a risk you carry until it is written down, so we vet on infrastructure as code rather than accepting console familiarity. Data residency is straightforward to implement once your policy is clear, and our engineers are used to building to it.
- Cost work usually pays for itself early
- Region and residency requirements handled as standard
- Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Experts across the AWS ecosystem
- Design scalable systems using EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS, and more.
- Infrastructure as CodeDeploy with Terraform, CloudFormation, and CDK best practices.
- DevOps & CI/CDAutomated pipelines, testing, rollbacks, and observability.
- Security & IAMSecure infrastructure with IAM, VPC design, secrets, and policies.
- Monitoring & AlertsCloudWatch, X-Ray, and custom logging for full system visibility.
- Migration SupportMigrate workloads and systems to AWS with minimal downtime.
The alternative
Get speed, fit and in-house feel without the hiring grind.
Cloud EmployeeIn-house hiringDev agenciesFreelancers
Speed to hire✓-✓✓
Flexibility to scale✓-✓✓
Developer fit (embedded)✓✓✓-
Full-time, only for you✓✓--
No overhead or upfront fees✓--✓
Solid lime = yes · outline lime = partial · grey dash = no
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 · AWS · 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.
Ask our AI anythingWhy Cloud Employee
Engineers who own the estate they build
Cloud estates drift, and the drift is invisible until something breaks or the invoice arrives. Keeping the person who built yours is the cheapest form of documentation. 97% of our engineers stay beyond two years, at 50 to 75% less than hiring the same seniority in Britain.
- Vetted on operated infrastructure, not certifications
- Working your hours and onboarded to your stack
- Continuing support from our operations team
More than developers
Our people and process support your AWS engineers daily, with a UK-based account manager as your point of contact.
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.
What role are you hiring for?
Pick one to start - you'll see matching engineers at the end.
- 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 AWS developer in the UK?
For most roles, 50 to 75% less than the full cost of a comparable British hire, including salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads. Yes, we place UK-based AWS engineers. The majority of our clients still end up in Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, because the talent is comparable and the price is not, and Eastern Europe overlaps a British day almost completely. The offer is really the strongest quality-to-cost ratio we can find, first-rate cloud engineers at a sustainable price.
02What is AWS and why do teams build on it?
AWS is the largest cloud platform, offering computing, storage, databases, networking and hundreds of higher-level services on demand instead of in your own server room. Teams build on it because nearly any architecture is possible without capital expenditure, scaling follows demand, and the operational heavy lifting, backups, redundancy and physical security among it, becomes someone else's specialism. The platform's breadth is itself a hazard though, since every service adopted is a dependency chosen, and costs scale as smoothly as capacity, in both directions.
03What skills should I look for in an AWS developer now?
Security posture, cost literacy and infrastructure-as-code habits, in that order; an AWS developer who lacks any of the three is a liability wearing a certification. IAM judgement comes first because a misconfigured permission is the classic cloud catastrophe, and least-privilege thinking has to be reflexive rather than aspirational. Cost literacy is engineering here, since architecture decisions are spending decisions, and the developer should read a bill the way they read a stack trace.
04How do I assess an AWS developer, and what should I ask?
Give them an architecture to critique rather than a whiteboard to fill; describe a real system, then ask what worries them, and listen for security and cost before elegance. Strong candidates ask about traffic patterns, data sensitivity and budget early. Ask for a bill they have personally reduced and how; genuine cost work leaves specific memories, of idle instances, chatty services and storage nobody owned. Pose a failure, a region event or a leaked credential, and have them review infrastructure code with AI tooling, watching whether generated permissions get flagged.
05Are AWS developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Demand for AWS skills remains among the broadest in technology, because the platform's market position makes it the default context for an enormous share of engineering work. Worth building on is nearly a settled question at the platform level; the deeper question is how to build. Skills anchored in fundamentals, networking, security models and cost mechanics, transfer across clouds and outlast individual services, while skills anchored in memorising service trivia age like fruit.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, and cloud work makes the verification question concrete, because AI-generated infrastructure code does not just risk bugs, it risks over-broad permissions and surprise spending. Our AWS developers use assistants for drafting infrastructure definitions, policies and automation scripts, under a discipline we vet for directly; generated policy gets reviewed for least privilege, generated architecture gets costed before it exists, and nothing reaches production unreviewed by the engineer who owns it. The platform rewards this posture, since infrastructure-as-code makes review possible in a way console-clicking never was.
07How does Cloud Employee vet AWS developers?
AWS candidates go through our CTO-led vetting with the pairing session pointed at infrastructure, working through realistic architecture, security and cost problems with a senior engineer. The technical assessment, cultural fit screen and psychometric assessment we designed for software engineers complete the process. We rate production evidence above certifications every time; plenty of certified candidates have never been paged at night, and it shows. How they work with AI tools is assessed too, particularly whether generated infrastructure and policy code gets the sceptical review it needs.
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