{"id":2354,"date":"2026-01-06T17:06:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-06T16:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/denbeke.be\/blog\/?p=2354"},"modified":"2026-01-08T18:25:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T17:25:22","slug":"building-adeptiq-tech-stack-of-an-ai-powered-european-ats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/denbeke.be\/blog\/programming\/building-adeptiq-tech-stack-of-an-ai-powered-european-ats\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Adeptiq: tech stack of an AI-powered European ATS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"251\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/denbeke.be\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/adeptiq-mascotte-building-tech-stack-251x300.png\" alt=\"Adeptiq mascotte building tech stack\" class=\"wp-image-2355\" srcset=\"https:\/\/denbeke.be\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/adeptiq-mascotte-building-tech-stack-251x300.png 251w, https:\/\/denbeke.be\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/adeptiq-mascotte-building-tech-stack.png 657w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 251px) 100vw, 251px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>A few months ago we launched&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/adeptiq.be\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Adeptiq<\/a>, an applicant tracking system with AI features for CV parsing and candidate search. In this post I want to share the technical choices we made and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The short version: we built Adeptiq on a stack that is cloud-native, largely self-hosted, and European. For a product handling sensitive candidate data, this was a trivial choice \u2014 GDPR compliance, data sovereignty, and security aren&#8217;t afterthoughts when you&#8217;re processing people&#8217;s CVs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>The stack at a glance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Backend:<\/strong>&nbsp;Go + PostgreSQL + Echo<\/li><li><strong>Frontend:<\/strong>&nbsp;Vue.js<\/li><li><strong>Auth:<\/strong>&nbsp;Zitadel (self-hosted)<\/li><li><strong>AI:<\/strong>&nbsp;Mistral<\/li><li><strong>Infrastructure:<\/strong>&nbsp;Containers on Scaleway<\/li><li><strong>CI\/CD:<\/strong>&nbsp;Forgejo (self-hosted)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2>Backend: Go + Postgres + Echo<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Go was a no-brainer for me. I&#8217;m a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/denbeke.be\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">freelance Go developer<\/a>&nbsp;and have been writing Go professionally for years \u2014 it&#8217;s my go-to language for backend services. The reasons are well-known: fast compile times, easy deployment (single binary), great concurrency, and a standard library that covers most needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the web framework we use&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/echo.labstack.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Echo<\/a>. It&#8217;s lightweight, fast, and stays out of your way. Nothing fancy \u2014 just a solid foundation for a REST API.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PostgreSQL is the database. Boring choice, but boring is good. It handles our relational data well, and the&nbsp;<code>jsonb<\/code>&nbsp;type is useful for storing semi-structured candidate data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Frontend: Vue.js<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The frontend is a Vue.js single-page application. Vue is pleasant to work with and has a gentle learning curve. Not much else to say here \u2014 it does the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Authentication: self-hosted Zitadel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>For authentication we use&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/zitadel.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Zitadel<\/a>, self-hosted. It&#8217;s a full OIDC provider that handles user management, login flows, and all the security features you don&#8217;t want to build yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why Zitadel over Auth0 or Clerk? A few reasons:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Security out of the box:<\/strong>&nbsp;Zitadel gives us SSO and MFA without having to implement it ourselves. For a product that stores sensitive candidate data, we wanted to lean on a battle-tested auth solution rather than roll our own.<\/li><li><strong>Self-hosted:<\/strong>&nbsp;We control the data. No vendor lock-in, no usage-based pricing surprises.<\/li><li><strong>Cloud-native:<\/strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s designed to run in containers. Installation was straightforward.<\/li><li><strong>Lightweight:<\/strong>&nbsp;It&#8217;s written in Go and doesn&#8217;t need a lot of resources.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The tradeoff is that you&#8217;re responsible for running it. But if you&#8217;re already comfortable with containers and infrastructure, it&#8217;s not a big burden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>AI: Mistral for the smart bits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Adeptiq has two AI-powered features:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/adeptiq.be\/cv-import\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">extracting structured data from CVs<\/a>, and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/adeptiq.be\/ai-search\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">searching candidates using natural language queries<\/a>. For both we use&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/mistral.ai\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Mistral<\/a>&#8216;s completion models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One thing worth noting: we do text extraction and OCR ourselves before sending anything to the LLM. PDFs are parsed and images are processed on our own infrastructure. This keeps token usage down and means we&#8217;re not paying for the LLM to read badly scanned documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why Mistral over OpenAI? This one was easy:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>European data residency:<\/strong>\u00a0CVs contain personal data \u2014 names, addresses, phone numbers, work history. Under GDPR we have a responsibility to handle that data carefully. By using Mistral, we keep that data within Europe. No transatlantic transfers.<\/li><li><strong>Performance:<\/strong>\u00a0For our use case \u2014 structured extraction and semantic search \u2014 Mistral performs very well.<\/li><li><strong>Pricing:<\/strong>\u00a0Competitive, and predictable.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>When solid European alternatives exist, why look elsewhere?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Infrastructure: containers on Scaleway<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Everything runs in containers on&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.scaleway.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Scaleway<\/a>. We&#8217;re not using Kubernetes yet \u2014 just containers on managed instances, kept simple. Kubernetes will come once we need to scale further, but for now there&#8217;s no reason to add that complexity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Scaleway is a French cloud provider. The pricing is transparent, the UI is clean, and European data residency is built-in. For a B2B SaaS handling candidate data under GDPR, knowing exactly where your data lives isn&#8217;t optional \u2014 it&#8217;s essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>CI\/CD: self-hosted Forgejo<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>For CI\/CD we use&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/forgejo.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Forgejo<\/a>, self-hosted. Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which itself is a lightweight Git hosting solution. It includes CI\/CD runners that work well for our needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why not GitHub Actions or GitLab? We already had Forgejo running for code hosting, and its built-in CI covers our use case. One less external dependency, one less place where our code leaves our infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Wrapping up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s the full picture:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><thead><tr><th>Layer<\/th><th>What we use<\/th><th>The &#8220;default&#8221; alternative<\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody><tr><td>Cloud<\/td><td>Scaleway<\/td><td>AWS, GCP<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Auth<\/td><td>Zitadel (self-hosted)<\/td><td>Auth0, Clerk<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>LLM<\/td><td>Mistral<\/td><td>OpenAI<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>CI\/CD<\/td><td>Forgejo (self-hosted)<\/td><td>GitHub Actions<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Building on European infrastructure isn&#8217;t a compromise \u2014 it&#8217;s a competitive advantage. We get solid tools, GDPR compliance by default, and full control over where our users&#8217; data lives. The tradeoff is more operational responsibility, but for a small team that knows its way around infrastructure, that&#8217;s a fair trade for independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;re curious about Adeptiq itself, check it out at&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/adeptiq.be\/\">adeptiq.be<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few months ago we launched&nbsp;Adeptiq, an applicant tracking system with AI features for CV parsing and candidate search. In this post I want to share the technical choices we made and why. The short version: we built Adeptiq on a stack that is cloud-native, largely self-hosted, and European. For a product handling sensitive candidate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[289,235,161],"tags":[231,232,186,196,265,267],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v15.6.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Building Adeptiq: tech stack of an AI-powered European ATS &ndash; DenBeke<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/denbeke.be\/blog\/programming\/building-adeptiq-tech-stack-of-an-ai-powered-european-ats\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Building Adeptiq: tech stack of an AI-powered European ATS &ndash; DenBeke\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A few months ago we launched&nbsp;Adeptiq, an applicant tracking system with AI features for CV parsing and candidate search. 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