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
OpenAI Developers
Most British product teams have prototyped something on the OpenAI API; far fewer have put it in front of paying users. We embed engineers who have, full time on your hours, employed by us so there is no contractor arrangement to police.
- Real users behind their GPT work, not just demos
- Assistants, function calling and retrieval in production
- Full-time embedded, on British hours
Function CallingPrompt EngineeringLLM Architecture
Our Service
From model call to product feature
Copilots, automations, chat interfaces; your engineer builds the whole feature, not just the API call. We assess whether candidates use AI tooling well in their own workflow, put matches in front of you within seven working days, and charge one monthly fee with no placement cost.
- Whole-feature delivery, prompts through to interface
- Assessed on how well they work with AI tooling
- Interviews within 7 working days, one monthly fee
Embedded employees, never freelancers
Fluent across the OpenAI toolset
- Design & build custom GPT assistants with retrieval, tools, and context-aware flows.
- Function CallingUse OpenAI’s structured output tools to trigger workflows, lookups, and logic in your system.
- Embeddings & Vector SearchImplement search and memory using OpenAI embeddings and tools like Pinecone or Weaviate.
- Prompt EngineeringStructure prompts, system instructions, and user flows that feel natural and deliver consistent results.
- LLM ArchitectureMap your product flow to LLM patterns, tools, and stack best practices.
- Quality, Cost & Latency ControlOptimize usage and monitor for reliability, cost, and safety at scale.
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 AI Engineer · Python · LLM systems · RAG · 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?
The API is simple, the product is not
Anyone can call a model; the judgement lies in guardrails, cost control and knowing when an LLM is the wrong tool, and that is what our CTO-led vetting probes with live pair programming. A two-week money-back guarantee and free replacement mean a wrong match costs you nothing.
- Vetted on guardrails, cost and failure handling
- CTO-led process with live pair programming
- Two-week money-back guarantee plus free replacement
The operation behind the engineer
HR, retention and development handled by us, with a UK-based client success manager on your side of the clock.
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 OpenAI developer in the UK?
Around 50 to 75% less than a like-for-like British hire once salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads are counted. A UK-based AI engineer is on the table and we place them. Most teams still choose otherwise on ratio, since Eastern Europe, the Philippines and Latin America deliver the same standard for less. What we are offering is the strongest quality-to-cost ratio we can find, proven LLM builders at a price the business can sustain. Nearly every British company now wants OpenAI integration, while developers with real production experience remain scarce.
02What is the OpenAI platform and why do teams build on it?
The OpenAI platform is a set of hosted models and APIs for language, reasoning, vision and speech that teams call from their own software rather than training models themselves. Teams choose it because it turns capabilities that once needed a research group into an engineering problem, and the models are strong enough that quality depends on how you use them. You are renting intelligence from a third party, so pricing, rate limits and deprecations sit outside your control. If the model is one component among many, the platform is usually the fastest route.
03What skills should I look for in an OpenAI developer now?
Look for systems judgement first and prompt tricks last. A strong OpenAI developer designs the parts around the model, retrieval, evaluation, fallbacks, cost and latency budgets, because the API call itself is the easy bit. They should have shipped something where model output faced real users, and be able to explain how they measured whether it worked. AI has made syntax recall cheap and judgement expensive, and the discipline of testing non-deterministic software still matters. The differentiator is whether they treat the model as a component to be constrained, not magic to be trusted.
04How do I assess an OpenAI developer, and what should I ask?
Assess them on a small realistic task, then ask how they would know the feature is safe to ship. Give them a flawed prompt-plus-retrieval setup and ask them to diagnose it, strong candidates reach for evaluation data before they reach for prompt wording. Ask what they would log in production, how they would cap spend, and what happens when the model returns confident nonsense to a paying customer. Ask which failures they have actually seen, because anyone who has shipped LLM features has war stories, and anyone who has none has only built demos.
05Are OpenAI developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Demand is high and still broadening, because most companies are earlier in adopting LLM features than the noise suggests. Whether it is worth building on depends on what the model does for you. Features that summarise, extract, classify or draft are proven and cheap to attempt, while fully autonomous agents remain harder than the demos imply. The platform moves fast, which means the durable skill is not knowledge of any one model but the habit of measuring behaviour and swapping components as they improve.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, and for OpenAI work that is close to mandatory, since the person building with models should be fluent in working alongside them. Soundness comes from process, not faith. We assess during vetting whether a candidate uses AI tooling well, meaning they review, test and question generated code rather than pasting it in. AI has made producing plausible code cheap, it has made spotting the wrong abstraction expensive, and that judgement is what we select for. We use AI in our own hiring for screening and matching too.
07How does Cloud Employee vet OpenAI developers?
Vetting is CTO-led rather than recruiter-driven, which matters in a field where a CV full of buzzwords is easy to write. Candidates pass a technical assessment, then a live pair programming session with a senior engineer, where we watch how they reason about model-backed systems under real questioning. A cultural fit screen checks they can work embedded in a British team, and a psychometric assessment we built specifically for software engineers looks at how they think. A two-week money-back guarantee plus free replacement covers a wrong match, and 97% stay beyond two years.
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