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
Ruby Developers
Senior Ruby and Rails engineers working British hours on applications that are already earning. The local pool has thinned as attention moved elsewhere, which is usually why a British team with a healthy Rails codebase finds it hard to staff.
- Rails at scale, from monoliths to service architectures
- Comfortable with Hotwire, React or plain JavaScript
- Working your hours and embedded in your workflow
API BackendsFrontend IntegrationLegacy RefactoringPerformance OptimizationTesting & CI/CD
Our service
Rails engineers embedded in your UK team
We place full-time Ruby engineers matched to your stack and your working day. A large share of British Rails work is inheriting an application several versions behind and moving it forward without freezing new features, so we match for upgrade experience rather than framework familiarity alone.
- Current Rails practice, from Hotwire to API-only builds
- Equally at home on legacy and greenfield
- Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Full-time engineers, never freelancers
Rails proficiency
- End-to-end development with Ruby on Rails, from logic to UI.
- API BackendsClean, well-tested APIs for mobile, web, or partner use.
- Frontend IntegrationRails + React, Stimulus, or Hotwire for responsive UIs.
- Legacy RefactoringExperienced hands to refactor or modularize older Rails codebases.
- Performance OptimizationImprove app speed, background jobs, and query performance.
- Testing & CI/CDRSpec, Capybara, and integrated CI pipelines for confidence in delivery.
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 Ruby Engineer · Ruby · Rails · 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
Fix an N+1 query in a live endpoint
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
Rails engineers who read code as well as write it
Most of the value in an established Rails application sits in decisions someone made years ago. We vet on whether an engineer can work with that rather than around it, then keep them. 97% stay beyond two years, at 50 to 75% less than a comparable British hire.
- Vetted on production Rails, not tutorials
- Ready to join your daily stand-up on UK time
- 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 Ruby 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 Ruby 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. What we sell is the strongest quality-to-cost ratio we can find, seasoned engineers at a sustainable price. Fewer new developers learn Ruby now, yet the established Rails businesses in Britain still need senior people.
02What is Ruby on Rails and why do teams still choose it?
Ruby is a language known for readable code; Rails is the web framework built on it. Rails takes strong opinions about how an application should be structured, which sounds restrictive and turns out to be its greatest strength, because a new engineer can open an unfamiliar Rails codebase and know roughly where everything lives. That convention has become more valuable, not less, in the age of generated code. A model produces Rails scaffolding fluently precisely because the patterns are so consistent, shifting the job towards deciding what should exist.
03What skills should I look for in a Ruby developer now?
Systems first, code second. The ability to type out an ActiveRecord query from memory is worth far less than it was, because a model will produce one instantly. What has become more valuable is judgement, meaning you know which query will fall over at scale, and what happens to the rest of the application when this changes. Coding fundamentals still matter enormously, and we would not place anyone without them, but they are the floor rather than the differentiator.
04How do I assess a Ruby developer, and what should I ask?
Let them use their normal tools, including AI, then interrogate the result. Banning it tests for a world that no longer exists. Hand over a model or controller from your own codebase and ask what they would change and why. Ask them to describe a Rails upgrade they have done and what broke, and ask when they would not use Rails. Then the question that matters most now, asking them to review a plausible but wrong piece of generated code.
05Are Ruby developers still in demand, and is Rails worth building on?
Demand is steady and the pool has thinned, which is an awkward combination for anyone hiring locally. Attention moved to JavaScript and Python over the last decade, so fewer new developers learn Ruby while the applications built on it carry on earning. The wider shift matters too, because as tooling absorbs more of the routine work, the market has tilted towards people who can hold a whole system in their head. That suits Rails, which rewards structural thinking.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, and we would be wary of a senior engineer in 2026 who did not. The question is not whether someone uses the tooling but whether they exercise judgement over what it returns, which is exactly what we assess. In practice that means reviewing generated code as critically as a colleague's, and never committing something they could not explain. Your normal review process still applies. What changes is that the engineer treats model output as a first draft.
07How does Cloud Employee vet Ruby developers?
We use AI to augment our own hiring, running screening and matching across a large amount of data, but the decision stays human, because recruitment is a human endeavour. Vetting is CTO-led rather than recruiter-driven, so a technical assessment on real Rails code, live pair programming with a senior engineer, and a psychometric assessment we built specifically for software engineers. That last part is where systems-first thinking shows up, since we are looking for the mindset that builds systems. We then place people where they will actually thrive.
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