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
Pinecone Developers
Pinecone demos are easy and production indexes are not, particularly once latency, cost and relevance start pulling against each other. We embed engineers who have run vector search under real load, full time and on your working day.
- Real production Pinecone experience, not sandbox trials
- Latency, cost and relevance balanced deliberately
- Full time in your team, on British hours
Embedding IntegrationReal-Time RetrievalData PreprocessingTooling & MiddlewareMonitoring & Scaling
Our Service
Retrieval infrastructure, done properly
Your engineer designs embedding pipelines, index structure and query logic around your product rather than a template. We source and employ; you direct. Matched candidates within seven working days, embedded in about two weeks, one monthly fee throughout.
- Embedding pipelines and index design from first principles
- Plays well with OpenAI, LangChain and your existing stack
- Matched candidates within 7 working days
Low-risk monthly engagement
Built for vector workloads
- Choosing dimensions, metadata & filters for optimal semantic search.
- Embedding IntegrationWorking with OpenAI, Cohere, or custom models for dense vector creation.
- Real-Time RetrievalHigh-performance querying and re-ranking strategies for live LLM apps.
- Data PreprocessingChunking, formatting, and optimizing data for semantic relevance.
- Tooling & MiddlewareUsing LangChain, LlamaIndex, and custom pipelines to retrieve intelligently.
- Monitoring & ScalingCost optimization, error tracking, and vector DB scaling strategies.
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?
Relevance is a judgement call, not a setting
A vector index that returns plausible but wrong results fails silently, so we vet for the evaluation discipline that catches it early. Vetting is CTO-led with live pair programming, engagements roll monthly with 30 days notice, and all-in cost sits 50 to 75% below a comparable British hire.
- CTO-led vetting with live pair programming
- Rolling monthly contract, 30 days notice
- 50 to 75% below the all-in cost of a UK hire
The operation behind the engineer
Onboarding, HR and retention run by us, with a UK-based client success 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 Pinecone 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 engineers 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. Our aim is the strongest quality-to-cost ratio we can find, genuine vector search capability at a price that keeps working for the business. Pinecone is new enough that dedicated UK experience barely exists.
02What is Pinecone and why do teams choose it?
Pinecone is a fully managed vector database, used to store embeddings and retrieve the most similar items at speed, most often as the retrieval layer in AI applications. Teams choose it precisely because it is managed. There are no indexes to shard, no clusters to babysit, and capacity scales without an infrastructure project, which lets a small team ship semantic search or retrieval-augmented generation quickly. The trade-offs are the mirror image, a proprietary service dependency, costs that grow with scale, and internals you cannot tune the way you can with an open-source engine.
03What skills should I look for in a Pinecone developer now?
The Pinecone API is small, so look for retrieval judgement rather than product-specific knowledge. The engineer's real work is everything around the index, choosing embedding models, chunking documents sensibly, designing namespaces and metadata filters, and combining vector scores with keyword signals when pure similarity is not enough. Ask whether they can measure retrieval quality, because relevance you cannot measure will quietly rot as your data grows. AI has made it trivial to stand up a demo that retrieves something, the scarce skill is proving it retrieves the right things.
04How do I assess a Pinecone developer, and what should I ask?
Give them a retrieval problem with messy real documents and judge how they reason about quality, not how fast they call the API. Ask how they would chunk a contract differently from a chat log, and how hybrid search changes things for names and codes that embeddings fumble. Then the discriminating question, how would you prove to me that retrieval got better after your change. Strong candidates describe building an evaluation set from real queries, weak ones say the results looked better.
05Are Pinecone developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Demand tracks the wider surge in retrieval-augmented AI products, and Pinecone sits prominently in that wave, so yes, the skills are sought after. Whether to build on it is a sharper question. Managed vector search is worth paying for when your team is small, your timeline is short, and retrieval is a component rather than your core intellectual property. It deserves harder questioning when usage pricing dominates or data residency demands self-hosting. The underlying skills transfer across every vector store, so an engineer hired for Pinecone is not stranded if you migrate later.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, our engineers work with AI tools daily, which is fitting when the job itself is building AI retrieval infrastructure. Trust comes from verification habits we test for directly. In vetting we assess whether candidates use AI tooling well, and retrieval work gives that a concrete meaning, generated pipeline code often works on clean sample data and fails on your real documents, so we watch whether a candidate insists on testing against realistic inputs. Code is cheap to produce now and expensive to judge, so we hire the judgement, and a human always decides.
07How does Cloud Employee vet Pinecone developers?
The process is CTO-led rather than recruiter-driven, because retrieval engineering competence is invisible to keyword matching. Candidates take a technical assessment, then a live pair programming session with a senior engineer working on realistic retrieval problems, where we see whether they think in evaluation sets and cost, or just in API calls. A cultural fit screen and our psychometric assessment, built specifically for software engineers, examine how they think and work. You are interviewing matched candidates within 7 working days, with the engineer embedded in about two weeks.
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