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
Node.js Developers
Senior Node engineers working your British day on the services behind your web and mobile products. Most serious UK Node codebases moved to TypeScript some time ago, so we vet on that rather than treating it as optional.
- TypeScript on Node as standard, not a bonus
- APIs, queues and real-time features
- Working your hours and embedded in your team
Framework MasteryDatabase IntegrationReal-Time AppsCloud Deployments
Our service
Node engineers embedded in your UK team
Knowing how a distributed system fails is a different skill from knowing how to write one, and it is the one that matters at three in the morning. We match engineers who have operated services rather than only built them. Cloud Employee is the employer of record, so you get a committed employee.
- Experienced with existing microservices, not just greenfield
- Websockets and event handling where the brief needs it
- Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Node expertise that delivers
- Build REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs that scale with your product.
- Framework MasteryEngineers skilled in Express, NestJS, Fastify, and custom server frameworks.
- Authentication & Auth FlowsBuild secure login, OAuth, JWT-based flows and session handling.
- Database IntegrationWork with SQL, NoSQL, and ORMs like Prisma and Sequelize.
- Real-Time AppsBuild real-time products using WebSockets, Socket.IO, and Redis Pub/Sub.
- Cloud DeploymentsDeploy on AWS, GCP, or serverless platforms using best practices.
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 Node.js Engineer · Node.js · Express · Postgres · 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 request handler
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 stay on call for what they built
Services are easy to write and hard to run, and the person who built yours is the one who can fix it fastest. 97% of our engineers stay beyond two years, backed by a 1,000 pound annual learning budget, at 50 to 75% less than a comparable British hire.
- Vetted on running systems, not just shipping them
- Working your hours and ready for daily stand-ups
- Retention and operations support after the hire
More than developers
Our HR, technical and client success teams support delivery from day one, 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 a Node.js developer in the UK?
In most cases 50 to 75% less than employing a comparable British developer, counting salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads. We place UK-based Node developers as readily as anywhere else. Where most clients arrive is Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, because the engineers are just as strong and the cost is considerably lower, with Eastern Europe sharing nearly all of your working day. The aim is the best quality-to-cost ratio we can find, exceptional engineers at a sustainable price. Node.js is the default backend for startups and scale-ups in Britain.
02What is Node.js and why do teams build on it?
Node.js is a runtime that lets JavaScript run on the server, so one language covers frontend and backend, with an event-driven design suited to handling many connections at once. Teams build on it for that shared language, smaller teams cover more of the stack, hiring is simpler, and code and types can be shared end to end. The event loop makes Node excellent for APIs, realtime features and I/O-heavy services, and a poor fit for heavy CPU-bound work. Choose it for product velocity, and avoid it for compute-heavy workloads.
03What skills should I look for in a Node.js developer now?
Prioritise engineers who genuinely understand the event loop, because it is the difference between Node.js developers and JavaScript developers who deploy to a server. That understanding shows in how they handle async code, backpressure, streams and the one blocking call that quietly ruins a service's latency. TypeScript is effectively the professional standard now, so treat it as the floor. Look for supply-chain judgement, since AI assistants recommend packages fluently and sometimes wrongly. With generated code everywhere, the scarce skill is knowing why the plausible version is wrong.
04How do I assess a Node.js developer, and what should I ask?
Assess a Node.js candidate on asynchronous reasoning and code review, the two activities that expose depth fastest in this ecosystem. Give them a small service with planted faults, an unawaited promise, a blocking synchronous call, an unhandled rejection, and watch what they find and how they explain the consequences. Ask them to design an API with realistic load and failure requirements, listening for backpressure and timeouts. Invite AI tools into the exercise, then ask them to critique what the assistant produced, since strong engineers catch the subtle async mistakes generated code makes.
05Are Node.js developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Node.js developers are in demand at almost every company size, because the runtime sits under a huge share of the web's APIs, tooling and services. The pool is correspondingly deep, which for a hiring manager is the real story, you can be selective in a way smaller ecosystems do not allow. The platform is a safe foundation, mature and central to the JavaScript economy, and it has picked up a fresh role as a common runtime for AI product backends. The caveat is quality variance, so vetting matters more here.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, our Node.js developers use AI assistants daily, and the ecosystem's specific risks shape how we verify, async correctness and dependency choice above all. Generated JavaScript tends to look right and mishandle the awkward cases, race conditions and error paths in async flows, so review and testing habits do the protecting, and we assess those habits live during vetting. Whether a candidate uses AI tooling well is an explicit vetting criterion, demonstrated in pairing with a senior engineer. AI augments our own screening and matching, and a person makes every decision.
07How does Cloud Employee vet Node.js developers?
Node.js candidates pass our CTO-led, four-stage vetting, which exists because this ecosystem's deep talent pool contains every level of ability wearing similar CVs. The stages are a technical assessment, live pair programming with a senior engineer, a cultural fit screen and a psychometric assessment we built for software engineers. Pairing does the heavy filtering, and we watch how candidates verify their AI tools' output as part of it. Our screening and matching run AI over a large pool, and the decision is always human. You interview matched candidates within 7 working days.
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