boardwatch

A self-hosted job radar that reads the fine print. Point it at the companies you care about. boardwatch watches their official ATS job boards, catches new postings early, and ranks them against your profile with an explainable score. It also reads each posting for the hard eligibility requirements that quietly rule people out (visa sponsorship, security clearance, a required degree, years of experience, a location) and flags the ones you could not actually apply to, each backed by the exact sentence it read as evidence. Nothing is guessed, nothing phones home, and it all runs on your own machine.

Status: pre-release, under active development. boardwatch does not submit applications: it finds and evaluates postings, and you decide what to do with them. No telemetry. No accounts, no API keys. Your data stays in a local SQLite file.

$ boardwatch top
 #   Title                            Company     Score   Eligible   Why
 12  Senior Backend Engineer          Stripe      0.86    no flags   covers 9/11 skills · title · 1d
 7   Software Engineer, Platform      Linear      0.81    check      covers 7/10 skills · title · 3d
 33  Backend Engineer (Payments)      Ramp        0.74    no flags   covers 6/9 skills · 2d
 5   Full-Stack Engineer              Supabase    0.68    no flags   covers 5/8 skills · title · 6d
 18  Infrastructure Engineer          OpenAI      0.61    check      covers 4/9 skills · 4d

2 postings hidden as ineligible (run with --include-ineligible to see them).

(Illustrative output. # is the posting id; pass it to boardwatch show <id> for the full posting, a per-component score breakdown, and the eligibility audit with quotes. "no flags" means no catalogued disqualifier was found, not that you are cleared to apply; "check" means the posting was ambiguous.)

Why boardwatch?

Job boards optimize for their advertisers, not for you. LinkedIn/Indeed bury fresh roles under sponsored noise and stale reposts; paid trackers put a subscription (and their servers, and your search history) between you and postings that are already public.

boardwatch takes the direct route. Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, SmartRecruiters and Workday each expose a public, keyless JSON endpoint for every board they host, the same data the company's own careers page renders. boardwatch polls those endpoints politely, on your schedule, and tells you what's new since last time.

Honest limits. boardwatch only covers companies hosted on Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, SmartRecruiters or Workday (a large slice of tech, but not everyone, no Taleo/etc. yet). It reads exactly what those APIs expose. It is pre-release: expect rough edges, and read Responsible use before pointing it at boards you don't own.

Quickstart (≈2 minutes to your first shortlist)

Prerequisites. Scanning and ranking need nothing beyond the install. Building résumé PDFs additionally needs two binaries on PATH — tectonic and poppler's pdfinfo:

brew install tectonic poppler                       # macOS
sudo apt-get install poppler-utils                  # Debian/Ubuntu (tectonic: see its docs)

boardwatch doctor reports whether both are present. The Docker image bundles them.

Supported on macOS and Linux. Windows is best-effort — see platform support.

pipx install boardwatch      # isolated, on your PATH
boardwatch init              # pick a starter set of companies + paste your profile
boardwatch scan              # poll the watched boards (polite, conditional GETs)
boardwatch top               # ranked shortlist

New here? Run boardwatch guide at any time to see the whole journey.

boardwatch init is interactive. Pick [1] Starter set to watch a curated group of well-known boards in one keystroke, [2] Search registry to pick from the bundled catalog, or [3] Paste any provider:slug or board URL. Then paste your résumé text and a few target/exclude titles and locations. A cold init → scan → top lands your first ranked shortlist in well under ten minutes.

Other install methods

Docker

docker run --rm -v boardwatch-data:/data \
  ghcr.io/mit112/boardwatch:latest --data-dir /data init
docker run --rm -v boardwatch-data:/data \
  ghcr.io/mit112/boardwatch:latest --data-dir /data scan
docker run --rm -v boardwatch-data:/data \
  ghcr.io/mit112/boardwatch:latest --data-dir /data top

From source

git clone https://github.com/mit112/boardwatch && cd boardwatch
uv sync                      # https://docs.astral.sh/uv/
uv run boardwatch init

How it works

   init ──▶ scan ──▶ top ──▶ show <id> ──▶ track
   │        │        │        │             │
   companies fetch    rank on   full posting + record what
   + profile boards   demand    score breakdown you did

• init: one-time setup. Choose companies (starter set / registry search / paste), then your profile (résumé text, target titles, excludes, locations, remote-only).
• scan: fetches every watched board through a polite fetcher (per-host pacing, retries with backoff, conditional If-None-Match/If-Modified-Since so unchanged boards cost a 304), then applies each board transactionally. Prints a one-line summary.
• top [N]: ranks open postings against your profile right now (weights are read live), newest-and-most-relevant first, with a one-line "why".
• show <id>: the full posting plus a per-component score table (skill coverage, title match, recency, location fit) and the eligibility audit with quoted evidence.
• track: record what you did with a posting — add, status, list, log — so a lead you already applied to doesn't resurface tomorrow. See Your funnel.
• eligibility: facts / policy to tell boardwatch your situation, run to evaluate open postings, summary for a funnel of what the catalog matched. See Eligibility audit.
• companies: add / remove / search / list / import / export your watched boards. boardwatch companies add https://boards.greenhouse.io/acme just works.
• doctor: per-board connectivity and freshness, plus a local DB integrity check.
• config show / config set: tune politeness and ranking weights (see below).

run performs the same pipeline unattended — scan, evaluate, rank, and tailor — as one scheduled command; see the unattended run guide.

Ranking, briefly

Each posting gets a 0–1 score: a weighted blend of skill coverage, title match (fuzzy), recency (exponential decay), and location fit. Undefined components renormalize away, so a sparse profile still ranks sensibly. Nothing is precomputed: change a weight and the next top reflects it. show <id> prints the exact arithmetic.

Eligibility audit

Ranking tells you how well a posting fits. The eligibility audit tells you whether you could apply at all, and shows its work.

You describe your situation once, in the catalog's own vocabulary:

boardwatch eligibility facts set work_authorization.status citizen
boardwatch eligibility facts set highest_degree bachelor
boardwatch eligibility facts set employment_type_preference fte_only
boardwatch eligibility policy set work_auth blocker   # treat this family as disqualifying

Then boardwatch eligibility run reads each open posting for catalogued requirements (visa sponsorship, security clearance, degree, years of experience, employment type, internships, location, and more), resolves them against your facts, and stores a verdict. boardwatch show <id> prints it with the receipts:

Eligibility: ineligible
  unmet · required: work authorization / sponsorship
      quote: "This role is not able to sponsor employment visas now or in the future."

Three properties are deliberate:

• Evidence-linked. Every requirement carries the exact sentence it was read from, sliced from the posting version that was evaluated. Nothing is paraphrased or invented.
• Deterministic by default. The same posting and the same facts always produce the same verdict. Out of the box there is no language model in the loop and nothing to hallucinate: the vocabulary and rules are a versioned catalog, and a verdict is invalidated and recomputed only when your profile or the catalog changes. There is an opt-in, off-by-default model-assisted gate that can additionally hide a posting it reads as ineligible; it can only ever hide, never clear, and turning it off restores the fully deterministic path.
• Honest. A clean posting reads as "no flags", never as a guarantee. "no flags" means only that no catalogued disqualifier was found, not that you are cleared to apply, and ambiguous wording reads as "check" rather than a false all-clear.

boardwatch eligibility summary shows the funnel (how many postings were evaluated, the verdict split, and what fired per family) so you can watch the catalog working before you trust a hidden count. By default top hides postings that are ruled out and reports the count; top --include-ineligible shows them.

top also hides postings whose title is not a software role — a "Deal Strategist" or an "Asset Tracking Technician" that fuzzy title matching would otherwise float to the top. The same rule applies to notify. This filter is deliberately loud rather than silent: the count appears under the table, stats reports it, show <id> tells you what the gate made of any posting, and top --include-non-swe lists the hidden rows with the exact title text that vetoed each one. A title that gives no signal either way is never filtered — it is scored normally, so a genuine software job with an unusual title is not at risk.

top can also hide postings whose title names a seniority band above the one you target — a "Distinguished Engineer" or a "Vice President, Engineering" that would otherwise crowd out the roles you can actually get. This is off until you ask for it: the profile field target_seniority_band is one of entry, mid, senior or any, it defaults to any, and on any the gate short-circuits before reading a single title. Set it with boardwatch profile edit. Like the role gate it is loud: the count appears under the table, stats reports it, show <id> explains any posting, and top --include-over-seniority lists the hidden rows with the title text that decided each one.

Only a confident hit hides a posting; an unresolved level token abstains rather than guessing. Level-aware gating is optional and documented in configuration.

What changed since you last looked

boardwatch scan records every appearance, disappearance and body revision in an append-only ledger. digest reads the ledger from wherever you left off:

boardwatch digest          # new, reopened, updated, and a closed count
boardwatch digest --peek   # the same view without consuming it
boardwatch top --new       # rank only the postings first seen since your last digest

The cursor is an event id, not a timestamp, so a clock change or a missed day cannot skip or repeat a window.

Your funnel

boardwatch never applies for you. It records what you did, so the state stays yours:

boardwatch track add 42                    # start tracking a posting
boardwatch track status 1 applied          # move it, with an immutable ledger entry
boardwatch track status 1 interviewing --note "phone screen booked"
boardwatch track list --status applied
boardwatch track log 1                     # the full history for one application

Where you stand

boardwatch stats is a one-screen, read-only readout over your local database — no network, no writes of its own:

boardwatch stats             # qualified opportunities (last 7 days) + the discovery pipeline
boardwatch stats --days 30   # widen the trailing window

The first view partitions recent postings into qualified / uncertain / ineligible / unevaluated; a posting you have not evaluated yet is unevaluated, never counted as qualified. The second view is the pipeline: seen → passes filters → not ineligible → tracked. It needs a profile, so run boardwatch init first.

Take your data with you

boardwatch export --format jsonl --out postings.jsonl
boardwatch export --format csv

Every row carries the posting, your funnel state, and the eligibility verdict together with the profile and rules hashes that identify the evaluation it was computed under. This is a flat snapshot, not a full audit trail; it does not support independent recomputation of verdicts.

Configuration

boardwatch config show prints every key, its value, and its default; boardwatch config set <key> <value> changes it (validated at set time and load time). The full key table lives in docs/configuration.md.

boardwatch settings gives a read-only view of every opt-in feature (LLM tiers, notifications) — state, what it does, what it sends anywhere — and boardwatch settings toggle flips them interactively; both share the same validation as config set. See docs/configuration.md.

Schedule scans and get notified — see scheduling.

Run the whole pipeline unattended — see the unattended run guide.

Tailor a résumé

boardwatch never parses a résumé — parsing free-form PDFs/Word docs to understand a person's history is exactly the kind of guessing this project avoids. Instead you author your résumé once as structured YAML, and tailor only ever renders it:

boardwatch tailor init                 # scaffold {config_dir}/resume.yaml, edit it in your editor
boardwatch tailor validate             # confirm it loads; see entry/bullet counts + detected skills
boardwatch tailor run <posting-id>     # tailor it against one posting's extracted JD skills

validate and run read {config_dir}/resume.yaml unless you pass --resume PATH. run also takes --out DIR (default {data_dir}/tailored), --format latex (the only 1.0 adapter), and --dry-run (report only; writes no file and records no artifact). It prints one line per bullet — kept, reordered, swapped, or dropped, with the JD skills that bullet covers — and the same per-bullet audit is stored on the artifact row.

tailor run selects which of your authored bullets to keep (favoring ones that cover the posting's extracted skills), reorders skill mentions, and applies whole-token synonym swaps from a small, bundled, frozen equivalence table (e.g. "JS" ↔ "JavaScript") — never free text generation. Before anything is written, a no-fabrication guarantee re-checks the output against your master résumé: every kept bullet's tokens must be either unchanged or a substitution the equivalence table names, and no bullet, entry, or section can appear that wasn't in the original. A résumé that fails this check is rejected before any file or database row is written, never delivered as a "best effort".

Honest bounds (Tier A). This is Tier A: a local, deterministic bullet-selection and safe-synonym pass — it does not rewrite your prose, invent new claims, or call any model. Your profile text (the free-form blurb from boardwatch init) is never imported into the résumé — tailor reads only what you author in resume.yaml.

PDF output is a hard gate, not best-effort. The renderer is tectonic, compiling a LaTeX template you can override at {config_dir}/resume_template.tex. A lead without a shippable PDF is refused rather than delivered as rendered source: a missing tectonic on PATH fails the run loudly, and a résumé that compiles to more pages than resume_max_pages (default 1) is rejected. Two binaries are required, not one — tectonic to compile and poppler's pdfinfo to count the pages; without pdfinfo the page-count gate cannot answer and every lead is refused. boardwatch doctor probes for both and exits non-zero if either is missing. Output lands at {data_dir}/tailored/tailored-<posting-id>.{tex,pdf} — a deterministic path, so re-running tailor run for the same posting overwrites that file even though each run is recorded as its own artifact in the database; the file on disk always reflects your most recent run, not necessarily the one you're currently reading about. If a later compile fails, the stale PDF from the previous run is removed rather than left behind next to the new source.

Opt-in LLM rewriting is covered in tailoring.

Career-profile bundle (unstable, not wired to anything yet)

boardwatch profile-bundle is a private, revisioned, filesystem-only store for the career facts a résumé is assembled from: typed YAML records, evidence captured by digest, owner approval bound to a content digest, and immutable content-addressed revisions. It lives at {config_dir}/career-profile (override with --bundle PATH) and nothing leaves your machine.

It is not connected to anything. boardwatch tailor still reads {config_dir}/resume.yaml; there is deliberately no bundle-to-résumé bridge yet, and the bundle's on-disk grammar, digests and JSON reports may still change. Use it only if you want to try the authoring model.

See docs/profile-bundle-authoring.md for the format, the twelve commands, the 0/1/2/3 exit contract, and recovery from a stale draft or a corrupt evidence blob.

Supported boards

Workday boards need three parts, not one. A Workday board is identified by a host, a tenant and a career-site slug, so its target form is workday:<host>/<tenant>/<CareerSite> — for example workday:acme.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/acme/AcmeCareers. Pasting the career-site URL (acme.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/AcmeCareers) works too and derives the tenant for you. Site slugs are case-sensitive; hosts and tenants are not. One tenant can serve several disjoint career sites, so each site is watched as its own board.

boardwatch ships a bundled registry of verified public boards (35+ companies, with a curated starter set), so init works offline out of the box. You can watch any board these providers host, not just the registry, with companies add. The registry is community-maintainable by PR; see src/boardwatch/registry/README.md.

Verifying a slug before you watch it. companies add and companies import are offline by default — they accept any well-formed provider:slug and let the next scan or doctor discover a typo. Pass --verify to probe each board first: boards that come back reachable are watched (a reachable-but-empty board is watched with a note), and boards that return 404 or cannot be reached are skipped rather than written. import --verify exits non-zero if it skipped anything, so a partial import does not read as a clean one.

Per-provider coverage limits: see provider notes.

Responsible use & legality

boardwatch reads the same public, keyless endpoints that power each company's own careers page: it does not scrape rendered HTML, log in, or bypass any access control. That is deliberately the least-invasive way to get this data. Still, these are third-party services, and using them responsibly is on you:

• Keep the politeness defaults. The defaults (≥1 request/sec per host, conditional GETs, bounded retries, a descriptive User-Agent) are intentionally gentle. Don't crank scan_workers up or per_host_delay_seconds down to hammer a board.
• It's for personal job-search use, not bulk data resale or redistribution of posting content. boardwatch stores postings locally for your review.
• Provider terms & rate limits can change and may restrict automated access. You are responsible for complying with each provider's Terms of Service. If a provider asks you to stop, stop.
• No warranty. These are undocumented-stability public endpoints; they can change or break without notice.

If you're unsure whether your use is appropriate, err toward watching fewer boards, less often. A job seeker checking a dozen companies once a day is the intended shape.

Privacy & data

• Local-first. Its primary store is one SQLite database in your platform data directory; the opt-in LLM tier also caches raw responses there as plain files on disk (override with --data-dir). No server, no account, no cloud.
• No telemetry. boardwatch phones home to nobody.
• Two optional secrets, env-only. The default path authenticates to nothing. The opt-in LLM tier reads BOARDWATCH_LLM_API_KEY and the opt-in webhook notifier reads BOARDWATCH_NOTIFY_WEBHOOK_URL, both from the environment only and never written to disk. See SECURITY.md.

Roadmap

• PyPI + GHCR published releases (pipx install boardwatch, docker run …)
• Notifications on new matches (desktop / webhook)
• digest and top --new change detection (only what changed since last run)
• More ATS providers (community-driven)
• Data-portability export (--format jsonl|csv)
• Résumé tailoring (tailor init/validate/run, local, no-fabrication guarantee)
• Workday provider (host/tenant/site composite board identity)
• More eligibility rule families (contract vs. full-time, internships)
• A readable settings surface, so every opt-in feature is discoverable and reversible without hand-editing config.toml
• Deduplication, so the same role posted twice is one lead and not two
• A durable decision ledger, so a lead you were already shown does not come back tomorrow
• Applied-state suppression, so a job you already applied to stays off the list
• A liveness re-check during run, so a requisition that has been taken down is dropped before a résumé is built for it

Next:

• An onboarding flow that fits fields other than software, so the eligibility taxonomy is gathered from you rather than assumed
• A measured acceptance run — the daily numbers published rather than asserted
• Broader company coverage, but only after the above shows the funnel converts; breadth multiplies whatever is downstream of it, including the mistakes

These boxes track main, which can run ahead of the latest published release. CHANGELOG.md is the authoritative record of what shipped in the version pipx install boardwatch gives you; anything under Unreleased needs an install from source.

Have a company on a board boardwatch doesn't reach yet, or an ATS you want supported? Open an issue.

Contributing

Contributions welcome: code, registry entries, or bug reports. See CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup (uv sync, make check) and the registry guide for adding a company board. All changes land via PR against a branch-protected main.

License

MIT.