For infrastructure decisions that outlive whichever provider made them
Hire Cloud Engineers
The cloud provider a company picks matters less than whether the decisions underneath it survive a provider switch, an audit, or a real outage. These engineers are tested on making decisions that hold up regardless of which logo is on the invoice.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a cloud engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The cloud bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask about a favourite provider. This one asks whether the architecture would survive an audit.
What we listen forWhether they evaluate a decision on its merits, not a sales pitch.
A company is being pitched hard by a cloud provider's sales team on a 'free credits' migration. Walk us through how you would evaluate the actual decision.
- What strong sounds like
- Separates the migration's genuine technical and cost merits from the incentive structure of the offer, proposing an independent evaluation.
- What gives us pause
- Evaluates the offer mainly on the size of the free credits without separately assessing the underlying migration cost and risk.
Terraform · Multi-cloud · Infrastructure as Code
Multi-region · Disaster Recovery · Cost Modeling
Chaos Engineering · Load Testing
Terraform Cloud · CloudHealth · Datadog
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,700–3,400per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$3,700–4,700per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$5,000–6,200per month
Cloud engineer
4 yrs · US East overlap
Ran a disaster-recovery drill that found two failure points the documented plan had missed
- Terraform
- AWS
- Azure
Senior cloud engineer
8 yrs · UK + EU hours
Planned a legacy migration that hit its deadline without a single weekend outage
- Multi-cloud
- IaC
- Chaos Engineering
Lead cloud architect
11 yrs · EU + US split
Talked a client out of a costly multi-cloud migration that solved a risk that didn't exist
- Architecture
- Cost Modeling
- Disaster Recovery
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
The four steps below focus on your actual infrastructure, not a provider-badge collection. Every one ends with something concrete, and exiting early owes us nothing.
Define the infrastructure problem
We map where your architecture's reliability or cost discipline is actually under strain. The brief names that gap, not a list of cloud services to know.
A brief your leads signMatch against your infrastructure
Candidates are screened against your actual provider mix, your IaC maturity and your review culture. Three engineers who understand your setup beat thirty who list cloud certifications.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Bring your own engineers to the migration-strategy and reliability exercises. What you see is judgement about real constraints, not a rehearsed provider comparison.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first bounded change to real infrastructure. A departure, if it ever happens, becomes our scheduling problem rather than a gap in your roadmap.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers whose architecture held up under real pressure.
Cloud proof is a disaster-recovery plan that actually worked, not a diagram that looked right. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
A disaster-recovery plan that actually worked, because someone finally tested it.
Aster North had a documented disaster-recovery plan nobody had tested in three years. An embedded cloud engineer ran the drill, found two steps that would have failed silently, and fixed them before the real thing happened.
- DR plan gaps found
- Two, before an incident
- Time to first successful drill
- One sprint
He talked us out of a multi-cloud migration that would have cost more than the risk it solved.
Sample · pending client approval
The migration plan she proposed got us off legacy infrastructure without a single weekend outage.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, an infrastructure pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one engineer working inside existing infrastructure. Some need a pod that owns the whole platform footprint. Where the honest need is a platform delivered rather than a role staffed, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single cloud specialist inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment, and the most common way teams start.
- Delivery pods
An infrastructure pod
A pod with its own lead that owns your infrastructure footprint end to end, reliability included. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Data & Cloud
The practice, not the person
Where the honest need is a platform delivered rather than a role staffed, data and cloud engineering owns that outcome instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a cloud hire is signed.
01What does a cloud engineer actually do day to day?
Designs infrastructure architecture, plans and executes cloud migrations, and builds disaster-recovery plans that get tested rather than just documented. The unglamorous majority of the work is making decisions that hold up regardless of which provider is running underneath.
02Do you hire for a specific cloud provider?
Matched to your actual stack. Architectural judgement about reliability and cost transfers across AWS, Azure and GCP, then the evaluation confirms familiarity with whichever one you run.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the reliability exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a cloud engineer start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a continuously evaluated bench. Real start speed after that tracks your own infrastructure access process.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
Your leads hold the architecture standards and set the roadmap. We take on the employment side instead: continuity, payroll, replacement risk and the handoff work when something changes.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Flag it early and the cost of replacing them is ours. The next engineer arrives briefed on the specific reason, which keeps second attempts rare.
07Do your cloud engineers use AI tools?
Yes, openly. AI drafts Terraform modules and cost models quickly; the engineer stays accountable for every architecture decision, migration plan and merge that reaches your infrastructure.
08How does pricing work for a hired cloud engineer?
The tier bands above hold for this role; the shortlist carries the confirmed figure per engineer. Monthly billing, no placement fee, notice-period exit only.