Building a Scalable and Modular Recruitment System: Front-End Architecture High-Level Design

In the competitive landscape of modern technology, a well-architected front-end plays a crucial role in ensuring a smooth user experience, scalability, and maintainability. I’m excited to share insights from our recent work on designing the front-end architecture for our unified platform, which combines cutting-edge solutions with best practices to deliver a robust, developer-friendly environment. This architecture is the foundation for multiple products, including the Recruitment System, Applicant Tracking System, Job Seeker Portal, and Learning Management System.

Meet the Team Behind the Architecture

Our talented front-end engineering team has been instrumental in designing and implementing this architecture:

• Sergey Kaplan: Web Architect
• Dmytro Kushnirov: Front-End Engineer Tech Lead
• Olexiy Osypets : Front-End Engineer
• Viacheslav Burlaka: Front-End Engineer
• Anton Shcherban: Front-End Software Engineer

Monorepo for Simplified Development

Our front-end development revolves around a monorepo setup, designed to minimize friction between different parts of the codebase. This approach allows developers to pull the repository and access all necessary first-party code seamlessly, making feature delivery faster and reducing dependency issues across projects. The monorepo is built with npm workspaces, providing a clear separation of concerns through distinct npm packages, and uses changesets for easy versioning and changelog management. By keeping everything in one place, we ensure consistency while offering flexibility for individual projects.

Design System for Consistency and Efficiency

The cornerstone of our front-end consistency lies in our Design System. It is built to provide reusable components, guided by atomic design principles that range from small units like buttons (atoms) to complex combinations like page templates. This helps our team maintain design uniformity across applications, allowing developers to reuse components confidently. We’ve also integrated design tokens that encapsulate the visual identity of our products, such as colors, typography, and spacing, ensuring consistency at the most granular level.

To enhance component development, we leverage Storybook, enabling us to develop, test, and document UI components in isolation. Additionally, Emotion and Theme UI allow us to efficiently manage theming and styling, creating visually appealing and maintainable components.

Development Infrastructure and Tools

We have selected a development stack focused on enhancing productivity and maintaining quality. TypeScript is our language of choice, providing strong typing for reliable code. Tools like ESLint and Prettier are used to enforce coding standards, while Jest and Testing Library ensure comprehensive unit testing.

Our CI/CD pipeline automates everything from building and testing to publishing packages. We enforce code quality standards throughout the development workflow, including linting, testing, and enforcing coverage metrics at each stage to ensure a robust and reliable system.

Design Patterns and Best Practices

We’ve incorporated essential design patterns and best practices to make our front-end more modular and maintainable. Separation of concerns, React Query for server-side state management, and initially considering Zustand but ultimately opting for Nanostores for client-side state management allow us to handle different kinds of data effectively. The system follows modular principles to enable easy enhancements, ensuring we can adapt quickly to evolving user needs.

A Lego Approach for SaaS Product Development

The architecture we’ve designed goes beyond a single application—it serves as a unified framework for building a set of SaaS products for both B2B and B2C markets. With a lego-style approach, we can create front-end components or even entire applications that can be integrated independently into our clients' existing solutions. This modularity allows us to offer tailored solutions, whether it be a Recruitment System, an Applicant Tracking System, a Job Seeker Portal, or a Learning Management System, all developed on top of the same scalable and flexible architecture.

Building the Future of Platform Development

The architecture we’ve designed offers a foundation for rapid feature delivery and simplified collaboration between teams. By implementing a monorepo, a cohesive design system, strong development tooling, and following well-defined best practices, we’re setting the stage for building an agile, scalable, and maintainable platform. This unified framework will enable us to develop and integrate various SaaS products seamlessly, catering to the diverse needs of our clients.

I’m looking forward to hearing from others about your experiences with front-end architecture for complex systems—let's collaborate and innovate together!