Refer Me
An entire two-sided hiring marketplace taken from empty repository to production, connecting candidates with verified employees who can refer them internally. Serves over 100,000 users.
A two-sided marketplace where both sides are strangers
Employee referrals convert far better than cold applications, but the two people who need each other have no way to meet: the candidate does not know who works at the target company, and the employee has no reason to trust an inbound stranger with a referral that carries their name.
Solving that means building both sides at once. A marketplace with candidates and no referrers is empty, and one with referrers and no candidates is worse, so matching quality has to be good enough on day one to justify either side showing up.
One team across product, application and infrastructure
There was no existing codebase, so we owned every layer: the product surface, the matching logic, the services behind it, and the infrastructure it runs on. That let us make architectural calls once and carry them through consistently rather than negotiating across teams.
Ranking verified employees against a target role by team, level and background overlap, so a referral request lands with someone positioned to actually make it.
The candidate-side surfaces for tailoring materials to a specific role and tracking referral requests through to submission.
Containerised services with a SQL data model behind them, split so the heavier data work never blocked the interactive path.
Docker-based services on GCP with the Next.js front end on Vercel, giving fast iteration on the product surface without loosening control of the backend.
Launched, and grown past a hundred thousand users
Refer Me went from blank repository to a live product serving over 100,000 users, with Rainier as the sole delivery team across product, engineering and infrastructure over a two-year engagement.
Have a system with the same constraints?
Send us the scope and the compliance requirements. We will tell you what the architecture should look like before you commit to anything.