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
Bubble Developers
British founders reach for Bubble when an idea needs proving before it earns a full engineering budget. We embed a senior Bubble developer in your team as a full-time colleague, working your working day, employed by us so there is no contractor status to untangle.
- Works your hours, joins your standups and your Slack
- Employed by Cloud Employee, so IR35 never enters the picture
- Senior product judgement, not just editor skills
Workflow LogicData ModelingThird-Party IntegrationsPerformance OptimizationScalable MVP Delivery
Our Service
One vetted builder, one monthly fee
Tell us what you are shipping and we will put matched Bubble candidates in front of you within seven working days. You pay a single monthly fee with no placement charge and nothing for interviewing, and the engagement rolls monthly with 30 days notice.
- Interviewing matched candidates within 7 working days
- Embedded and shipping in about two weeks
- Rolling monthly contract, cancel on 30 days notice
MVPs, internal tools and client portals
Where a senior Bubble developer earns their keep
- Build pixel-perfect responsive frontends that feel like native apps.
- Workflow LogicTranslate business processes into scalable workflows and user flows.
- Data ModelingStructure your database for speed, flexibility, and scale.
- Third-Party IntegrationsConnect with Stripe, Auth, CRMs, and other services via plugins or APIs.
- Performance OptimizationReduce load times and enhance UX through structured builds.
- Scalable MVP DeliveryShip early versions of products that are ready for users and investors.
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 Software Engineer · TypeScript · Python · Cloud · 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?
Vetted for judgement, not just clicks
No-code has made building cheap, which makes deciding what to build the expensive part. Our CTO-led vetting pairs every candidate with a senior engineer on a live build and screens for the data modelling and workflow discipline that keeps a Bubble app maintainable, at 50 to 75% below the all-in cost of a comparable British hire.
- CTO-led vetting with live pair building, not a CV sift
- 50 to 75% below the all-in cost of a UK hire
- Two-week money-back guarantee and free replacement
The operation behind the developer
Payroll, HR, kit and retention are ours to run, with a UK-based client success manager as your single 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 a Bubble developer in the UK?
Somewhere between 50 and 75% less than a comparable British hire when salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads are all included. We hire UK-based Bubble developers where that is what a client wants. More often the best value sits in Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, where the standard matches Britain at a much lower cost, and Eastern Europe is only an hour ahead of London. The point of the model is the strongest quality-to-cost ratio we can find, real capability at a sustainable price.
02What is Bubble and why do teams choose it?
Bubble is a visual development platform for building full web applications without writing traditional code, covering the database, the logic and the interface in one place. Teams choose it for speed; a founder can take an idea to a working product in weeks, then iterate in front of real users without a deployment pipeline. The trade-offs are real though. You are renting Bubble's infrastructure, so you accept its pricing model, its performance ceilings and a degree of lock-in that makes later migration a rebuild rather than a port.
03What skills should I look for in a Bubble developer now?
Look for data modelling, privacy-rule discipline and architectural judgement before any amount of workflow-building speed. AI has made the mechanical part of Bubble cheaper still; assistants can sketch workflows and page structures quickly, so the differentiator is the developer who designs a schema that survives growth, sets privacy rules that do not leak data through the API, and knows the platform's performance ceilings well enough to design around them. You also want honest fluency at the edges, using the API Connector well and dropping into custom JavaScript through plugins when the platform runs out.
04How do I assess a Bubble developer, and what should I ask?
Assess them on live work, not talk; ask for applications they built that are still running, and have them walk you through the data model and privacy rules. A short pairing session in the editor tells you more than any portfolio, so set a small task and watch how they structure it. Good questions include how they would spot and fix a slow page, when they would move logic to a backend workflow, and what would make them advise against Bubble entirely.
05Are Bubble developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Demand is real and growing, driven by startups validating ideas and operations teams replacing overloaded spreadsheets with proper internal tools. Whether it is worth building on depends on what you are building. Bubble rewards products whose main risk is whether anyone wants them; you can test, learn and change direction faster than any conventional stack allows. It punishes products that need heavy computation, fine-grained performance tuning or portability, because leaving means rebuilding.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, and on a platform like Bubble we treat skilled AI use as part of the craft rather than a shortcut to police. Our vetting specifically assesses whether a candidate uses AI tooling well, planning logic with it, generating custom code snippets for plugins, and then checking the result against the app's data model rather than trusting it blind. Soundness in Bubble is less about syntax, which barely exists, and more about whether workflows are efficient, privacy rules are watertight and the schema holds up.
07How does Cloud Employee vet Bubble developers?
Vetting is CTO-led rather than recruiter-driven, so the people judging a Bubble candidate understand what a well-built application actually looks like. Candidates go through a technical assessment, a live pairing session with a senior engineer working through a real build, a cultural fit screen and a psychometric assessment we built specifically for software engineers. For Bubble we care about evidence of shipped applications, sound data modelling and honest awareness of the platform's limits, not certificates.
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