Case study
HireBridge: federated candidate search for recruiter agents
A single Go binary that lets recruiter AI agents discover and search self-hosted candidate nodes, with signed snapshots and OAuth 2.1 keeping trust verifiable.
Highlights
- Runs in roughly 40 MB RSS as one static binary
- FTS5 keyword search fused with sqlite-vec embeddings via reciprocal rank fusion
- ed25519-signed candidate snapshots for verifiable provenance
The federation model
Job boards own candidate data; candidates get a profile form. HireBridge inverts that. Candidates run their own nodes (a LivingCV instance, for example) and stay the source of truth. Each node compiles a snapshot of its owner's embeddings and capabilities, signs it, and broadcasts it to HireBridge. Recruiter agents then get one place to discover and search across every participating node, without any node giving up custody of its data.
One small binary
The service is a single Go binary running in roughly 40 MB RSS, with SQLite as the only storage dependency. That is a deliberate stance: a federation hub should be cheap enough that anyone can run one, on the smallest VPS available, without a container orchestrator or a managed database in sight.
Search that fuses two rankings
Keyword search runs on SQLite FTS5. Semantic search runs on sqlite-vec embeddings. Neither alone is good enough for recruiter queries, which mix hard requirements (a language, a credential) with fuzzy intent (builds developer tools, ships fast). HireBridge runs both and merges them with reciprocal rank fusion, so a candidate who ranks well in either list surfaces, and one who ranks well in both rises to the top.
Trust is cryptographic, not promised
Every candidate snapshot is ed25519-signed by the originating node, so provenance is verifiable rather than asserted: a recruiter agent can check that a profile actually came from the candidate's own infrastructure and has not been altered in transit. Agent access uses the OAuth 2.1 device flow, which fits the reality that the client is often a headless agent authorizing through its operator's browser.
Where it fits
HireBridge is the recruiter-facing half of an ecosystem the other projects on this site build toward: LivingCV gives a candidate a self-hosted node worth pointing at, jobops includes the broadcast tool that compiles and signs the snapshot, and HireBridge makes the pool of such nodes searchable. Each piece stands alone; together they sketch what hiring looks like when candidates keep their own data.