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
Softr Developers
Softr lets a small British firm ship the client portal or internal dashboard that would once have needed a development agency. What it does not remove is the need for sound data design underneath. We embed developers who bring both, the polish on top and the structure below, on your team's hours.
- Fluent in Softr, its automations and interface logic
- Best used for portals, dashboards and internal tooling
- Working inside your product or operations team
Data IntegrationsUser AccessAutomationUI and DesignExtension and Scripts
Our Service
Vetting that looks under the interface
Candidates build live in front of a senior engineer during our CTO-led process, structuring data, modelling workflows and explaining their choices as they go. Fundamentals are the floor and judgement is the differentiator, and we screen for cultural fit so the developer works well with non-technical colleagues too.
- Matched across Softr, Airtable and automation stacks
- Proven through hands-on builds, not portfolio claims
- We carry HR, onboarding and retention throughout
We carry HR and retention throughout
Softr capability in depth
- Design maintainable page and component structures.
- Data IntegrationsConnect Airtable, APIs, or databases.
- User AccessConfigure roles, permissions, and gated content.
- AutomationAdd logic, formulas, and scheduled actions.
- UI and DesignBuild clean, consistent interface layouts.
- Extension and ScriptsAdd custom logic where required.
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?
Senior no-code skill without agency pricing
One monthly fee replaces the agency quote and the recruitment fee alike, at 50 to 75% below a comparable British hire once every employment cost is counted. The contract rolls monthly with 30 days notice, and the first fortnight is covered by a money-back guarantee plus free developer replacement.
- Sits alongside product and operations day to day
- Employment, compliance and admin held by us
- A UK-based client success manager on hand
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 Softr developer in the UK?
For most roles, 50 to 75% less than the full cost of a comparable British hire, including salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads. Yes, we place UK-based Softr developers. Most clients end up in Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, because the talent is comparable and the price is not, and Eastern Europe overlaps a British working day. Softr is niche, and experienced builders in Britain are mostly agencies and freelancers pricing by the project, making sustained work costly. You interview matched candidates within 7 working days, embedded in two weeks.
02What is Softr and why do teams choose it?
Softr is a no-code platform for building client portals, internal tools and simple web apps on top of data sources such as Airtable, without writing application code. Teams choose it for speed, since an operations lead can assemble a working portal in days, permissions and payments included, at a fraction of custom-build cost. Softr shines while needs match its blocks, but the moment you need bespoke logic or heavy data, you are outside what it wants to do. The mature approach is scaffolding, proving the workflow cheaply, then rebuilding in code only what outgrows it.
03What skills should I look for in a Softr developer now?
Look for process judgement above tool knowledge, because Softr's controls can be learned in a week while knowing what to build cannot. The valuable builder maps a messy business workflow into clean data structures, designs Airtable schemas that survive growth, and wires Softr to the rest of your stack through automations and APIs. They should name the platform's limits unprompted, since a builder who thinks Softr fits every problem will build you technical debt. Increasingly they work alongside AI, using assistants to draft formulas, and building interfaces on top of AI-driven workflows.
04How do I assess a Softr developer, and what should I ask?
Give them a real workflow from your business and ask them to design the solution, data model first, screens second. That ordering is the assessment, since builders who start with pages instead of data build things that collapse at the first requirements change. Ask where Softr would break in their design and what they would do then, good candidates describe escape hatches, custom code, API integrations, or advising you to build that part properly. Ask how they test before release, and how they use AI assistants for the formula layer.
05Are Softr developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Demand is real and growing, mostly inside operations and internal-tools teams rather than engineering departments, as companies discover how much of their software need is forms, tables and permissions. For internal tools, client portals and validating a product idea, yes, the economics are hard to argue with, and AI-assisted workflows are widening what no-code can orchestrate. For your core product, usually no, since you will eventually need the control that code provides. The durable skills your hire accumulates, data modelling and integration thinking, transfer wherever your stack goes next.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, and in no-code work AI shows up twice, assistants help draft the formulas, automations and small code snippets around Softr, and increasingly the workflows being built are themselves AI-powered. Soundness looks different without a compiler watching, so it depends entirely on the builder's discipline, checking data flows end to end, testing permission boundaries, and trying to break their own forms before users do. Our vetting assesses whether candidates use AI tooling well, and the live pairing session with a senior engineer shows their verification habits in real time.
07How does Cloud Employee vet Softr developers?
Through the same CTO-led process we apply to every engineer, not a recruiter keyword match, because no-code work punishes shallow logic just as code does. Candidates complete a technical assessment on data modelling and workflow reasoning, then live pair programming with a senior engineer through a realistic build, where design ordering and testing habits become visible. A cultural fit screen matters, and our psychometric assessment, built for software engineers, reads their problem-solving style. You interview matched candidates within 7 working days, embedded in two weeks, with a 1,000 pound annual learning budget each.
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