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
Zapier Developers
Most British businesses have a tangle of Zaps someone built in a hurry, and nobody now dares touch. We embed developers who treat automation as infrastructure, documented, monitored and safe to change, connecting your tools so the manual work genuinely goes away.
- Strong across Zapier, APIs and workflow design
- Useful to operations, support and product teams alike
- Embedded with your internal teams on British hours
API IntegrationsData TransformationsError HandlingVersioningOperational Reporting
Our Service
Tested on failure modes, not happy paths
Our CTO-led vetting puts candidates through workflow logic tests, API integration tasks and live pairing with a senior engineer. The bar is judgement, knowing what breaks when an API rate-limits or a webhook fires twice, because that is what separates an automation that runs for years from one that fails silently on a Friday.
- Matched for Zapier, integrations and automation logic
- Assessed by building real workflows under review
- Onboarding, HR and retention handled on our side
Onboarding and retention handled by us
What our Zapier developers take on
- Create stable workflows across multiple systems.
- API IntegrationsConnect CRMs, SaaS tools, and custom APIs.
- Data TransformationsAdd filters, conditions, and formatting.
- Error HandlingSet up alerts and fallback logic.
- VersioningManage and update automation logic safely.
- Operational ReportingMonitor workflow success and failures.
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?
A safer route than a contractor for ongoing ops work
Automation needs a keeper, not a one-off build. As employer of record we give you the same person month after month without contractor churn or IR35 questions, for one monthly fee on 30 days notice. Matched candidates interview within 7 working days and settle in over about two weeks.
- Woven into operations, support and product routines
- Employment admin and compliance stay our problem
- One monthly fee with no placement charge
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 Zapier developer in the UK?
The saving is typically 50 to 75% against a comparable British hire once salary, employer national insurance, pension, recruitment fees and overheads are totalled. UK-based automation specialists are absolutely something we place. What tends to decide it is the quality-to-cost ratio, which usually favours Eastern Europe, the Philippines or Latin America, working well for British teams, an hour from London. In Britain, Zapier expertise sits largely with consultancies built around short projects, so keeping automations maintained in-house is costly. Contracts roll monthly with 30 days notice, and 97% of engineers stay beyond two years.
02What is Zapier and why do teams choose it?
Zapier is an automation platform that connects thousands of business applications, moving data and triggering actions between them without custom integration code. Teams choose it because most operational drudgery is exactly this shape, when a form is submitted, update the sheet, notify the channel, create the invoice, and Zapier turns each into minutes of configuration instead of an engineering ticket. Its AI steps now extend that reach, classifying, extracting and drafting inside workflows that previously needed a human. Complex logic becomes unmanageable in a visual editor though, and per-task pricing climbs with volume.
03What skills should I look for in a Zapier developer now?
Process thinking first, because the real skill is seeing a business workflow clearly enough to automate the right version of it, not the clicking. A strong automation specialist maps the process before touching the tool, questions steps that should not exist, and designs flows that fail loudly instead of silently, error handling is what separates professional automation from hopeful automation. They should be fluent with webhooks, APIs and data formats, since serious Zapier work touches the edges of custom code, and increasingly skilled with AI steps, knowing where a model inside a workflow is reliable.
04How do I assess a Zapier developer, and what should I ask?
Describe a messy real process from your operations and ask them to design the automation, including what they would refuse to automate. That last part is the sharp edge of the assessment, strong candidates name the steps that need human judgement and design checkpoints around them, weak ones automate everything cheerfully. Ask what happens when a step fails overnight, and listen for monitoring, retries and alerts rather than a shrug. Ask when they would step outside Zapier into a webhook or a script, and where AI steps genuinely hold up in production workflows.
05Are Zapier developers in demand, and is it worth building on?
Demand keeps rising because the appetite for automation vastly exceeds engineering capacity in most companies, and AI has widened what workflows can do, which multiplies the surface worth automating. As the connective tissue between your business tools, yes, confidently, the time savings are immediate and the risk contained. As infrastructure for business-critical or high-volume processes, be more demanding, per-task costs scale up and complex flows in a visual editor become their own kind of legacy system. The strongest position treats Zapier as one tool in an automation practice, escalating to code where it belongs.
06Do your developers use AI tools, and how do you know the code is sound?
Yes, twice over in automation work, our specialists use AI assistants to build, and modern Zapier workflows increasingly contain AI steps making decisions inside the flow. Both need the same discipline, verification before trust. An automation that silently misroutes data is worse than no automation, so soundness means testing flows against real cases, building error paths, and putting human checkpoints where an AI step's mistake would be expensive. Our vetting assesses whether candidates use AI tooling well, and live pairing with a senior engineer shows whether that verification reflex is habit or theatre.
07How does Cloud Employee vet Zapier developers?
With the CTO-led process we use for every placement, not a recruiter checklist, because automation work needs engineering judgement even when little conventional code gets written. Candidates face a technical assessment weighted towards process reasoning, integration knowledge and error-handling instincts, then a live pair programming session with a senior engineer on a realistic automation problem, where design habits show honestly. A cultural fit screen and our psychometric assessment for software engineers profile their reasoning. You interview matched candidates within 7 working days, backed by a money-back guarantee plus free replacement.
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