Refynes — an AI career platform for Canada
We designed and built Refynes from the ground up — a single product where AI tailors a resume, finds the job, writes the cover letter, and coaches the candidate through. Live in Canada, used by 500+ job seekers.
- Role
- Product strategy · Brand & UI design · Full-stack engineering · AI integration
- Visit
- refynes.ca ↗
Why Refynes exists
Job seekers in Canada juggle four or five tools at once — a Word doc resume, LinkedIn, Indeed, ChatGPT for keywords, and a coach who’s hard to book. Refynes asked us to fold all of it into a single product where the AI does the busywork and the human does the strategy.
We did the whole thing. Strategy, brand, product design, engineering, AI integration, payments — start to ship in 9 weeks.
What we built
Eight tools, one workflow, one subscription. Pulled directly from the live product:
- AI Tailor — re-tunes language, ordering, and emphasis for a specific job posting, with side-by-side diffs so users always understand what changed.
- Job Board — pulls from 7 sources (LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, Workopolis, etc.) with one-click apply that uses the tailored resume automatically.
- AI Coach — async chat with a real coach, structured around weekly goals and tracked in the workspace.
- Autoapply — fire-and-forget bulk applications with per-posting variants.
- PDF Export — clean ATS-safe rendering, no broken layouts.
- Cover Letters — 50 starting points, all tunable to the role.
- 8 Templates — designed in-house, all ATS-tested.
- Resume Check — instant ATS pass-rate score with line-level feedback.
The numbers, six months in
How we worked with the founder
Three discovery workshops to find the smallest version of the right product. Weekly Friday demos. The same senior team that designed it built it — no hand-offs to juniors, no “agency layer” between thinking and shipping.
“Refynes felt complicated for months. After three workshops with Soft Code we had a sketch on a napkin we could actually ship. They understood the why before they touched a pixel.” — Founder, Refynes
Tech under the hood
- Frontend: Next.js 14, React Server Components, Tailwind, Framer Motion
- Backend: TypeScript on Vercel functions, Postgres + Prisma, Redis queues for the autoapply worker
- AI: Claude for the tailoring + coach assistant; embeddings for “more like this” job matching
- Payments: Stripe, with a free tier and a Pro tier that unlocks autoapply + the coach
- Auth: Passwordless, 1-click resume upload, no email-verify hoops
Where it goes next
Refynes is now expanding the coaching layer and adding a recruiter side (“For Recruiters” tab is live). We continue to support feature work and onboarding flows on a monthly retainer.