Problem
Traditional professional-networking demos often stop at profiles, feeds and job listings. They do not demonstrate how AI can use authenticated product context to provide career guidance or recruiter decision support.
CASE STUDY · AI / FULL STACK / TALENT TECH
ProLink AI
An AI-powered professional networking and talent platform that combines professional profiles, connections, jobs, applications and recruiter workflows with an authenticated, role-aware AI assistant grounded in application data.
NEXT.JS / FASTAPI / AI0.4
ProLink AI
AI-native professional networking & talent platform
Role-Aware AI AssistantCareer Copilot • Recruiter Assistant • Context-Aware Responses
Application & API LayerNext.js • FastAPI • JWT • REST
ProfilesNetworkJobsApplicationsRecruiterChatAuthAnalytics
Data & DeploymentSQLAlchemy • SQLite / PostgreSQL-ready • Render
THE CHALLENGE
Turning a professional-networking prototype into an AI-native product experience.
Design Goal
Build an original professional-networking and talent platform with clear application boundaries, secure authentication, role-specific workflows and an AI assistant that can reason over relevant user and recruiting data without exposing provider credentials to the browser.
THE SOLUTION
Professional networking plus contextual AI assistance.
Authenticated User→Next.js UI→FastAPI→Profile / Job / Application Context→AI Assistant→Grounded Response
Professional Experience
Users can sign in, view professional profiles, discover people, send connection requests, browse jobs, apply and track their own applications.
Recruiter Experience
Recruiter accounts can inspect the application pipeline and use a role-aware assistant for candidate summaries, match reasoning, skill-gap analysis and outreach drafting.
Context-Aware AI
The assistant receives server-built context from the authenticated user's profile, available jobs, applications, network state and recruiter pipeline rather than operating as a generic chatbot wrapper.
Resilient Demo Mode
A deterministic fallback keeps the public demonstration usable even when no external model key is configured or an AI provider is temporarily unavailable.
ENGINEERING
Technology and implementation.
Next.jsReactTypeScriptFastAPIPythonSQLAlchemyJWTREST APIOpenAI-compatible APIGitHub ActionsRender
Frontend
Next.js and TypeScript provide the professional-network UI, job workflows, recruiter dashboard, session-aware navigation and floating AI assistant experience.
Backend
FastAPI handles authentication, profiles, people discovery, connections, jobs, applications, recruiter authorization, chat context construction and conversation history.
Security
Protected endpoints use JWT authentication, recruiter context is role-gated, CORS is environment-controlled and the AI provider key remains server-side.
Deployment
The frontend and FastAPI backend are independently deployed on Render in Singapore with GitHub-connected deployments and environment-specific service configuration.
LIVE DEMO
ProLink AI v0.4 is deployed.
The public demo showcases professional and recruiter workflows plus the ProLink AI Assistant. The current portfolio deployment uses demo-oriented persistence and is PostgreSQL-ready for a more durable production configuration.
Portfolio / demonstration scope: ProLink AI is an original portfolio prototype for professional networking and talent workflows. Demo accounts, seeded data and fallback AI behavior are intended for demonstration, not production use.