Here is the moment the whole thing started.
A role came up that I was genuinely right for. Not "I could probably learn it" right. Right. The stack was mine, the domain was mine, the seniority line matched what I had actually been doing for three years. I found it on a Friday afternoon, on one of the big aggregators, in a list of things that were nominally "new".
I wrote a proper application. Tailored, not a template. I sent it that evening feeling quite good about my week.
The posting had been up since Tuesday morning. By the time I opened it, it had several hundred applications on it. I was not a candidate at that point. I was a row in a spreadsheet somebody had stopped scrolling three days ago.
The problem was never the number of jobs
This is the part that took me embarrassingly long to work out.
Every job board sells you volume. Fifteen thousand roles. Fifty thousand roles. A million roles. And every one of us has sat there at eleven at night with a filter panel open, scrolling a list of thousands, feeling like the problem is that we have not found the right one yet.
It isn't. If you are a mid-to-senior engineer in Europe, you do not have a discovery problem. You can find plenty of jobs you would be good at. What you have is a timing problem. You find them on day four, and the shortlist was drawn on day one.
Nobody sells against that, because it is boring and it is infrastructure and it does not look like a feature. It looks like nothing. It looks like an empty page that occasionally has something new on it.
Why boards are late
Once I started looking, the lateness was easy to explain. Most job boards are not reading employers. They are reading other job boards.
A role is posted on a company's own careers page, which runs on Greenhouse or Ashby or Lever or Workday. It gets syndicated somewhere. An aggregator picks up the syndication. A niche board picks up the aggregator. A newsletter picks up the niche board. Each hop is a batch job on a schedule, and each schedule has slack in it, and the slack compounds. By the time it reaches you it is Friday and the role went up on Tuesday.
And the layer nearest to you, the one you actually read, is usually the one with the least incentive to be fast, because it is selling you curation and community and a CV review, not minutes.
What I actually built
The fix is unglamorous. Skip every hop. Go to where the role is born.
Almost every serious European tech employer runs its board on an applicant tracking system with a public JSON endpoint. Greenhouse has one. Ashby has one. Lever has one. They are not secret and they are not scraped. They are the same endpoint the company's own careers page calls to draw itself. One request returns that employer's entire board, descriptions included.
So that is what this is. A list of 382 employers, each of their boards read directly, on the hour, every hour. When a role appears on a company's careers page, it appears here in the same hour. There is no aggregator in the middle, because there is no middle.
The unglamorous parts turned out to be most of the work. Boards answer
304 Not Modified when nothing has changed, so a warm run is
almost free and hourly costs nobody anything. Roles that vanish from an
employer's board get closed here within the hour, which is why you will not
find a two-month-old ghost posting on this site, the single most common
thing wrong with the boards I was using.
And a lot of it is watching for silence. The failures that hurt are never loud: a slug goes stale, an employer moves ATS, a WAF starts serving a challenge page with a 200 status, and a naive scraper records "0 jobs" and reports success. So the ingest compares every employer against its own history and complains when a board that had 300 roles yesterday has 4 today. That is not a feature anybody will ever thank me for. It is the reason the numbers on this site are worth reading.
What I decided not to do
I have been asked why there is no salary estimator, no after-tax calculator, no cost-of-living index, no AI CV reviewer, no six-week programme, no Discord.
Partly because other people do those, and some of them do them well. But mostly because I did not need any of them. I am an engineer living in Europe. I know roughly what I am worth and roughly what my rent is. What I could not do, no matter how organised I was, was be in front of a posting before three hundred other people were.
So the whole site is pointed at that one thing. The filters exist to get you to the handful of roles that are yours, by role, by country, by seniority, by stack, by whether the employer will sponsor a visa. And then the alerts exist to tell you the hour a new one lands, because that hour is the whole product.
The bit I get paid for
I will be straight about this, because a post like this one usually ends with a coy link.
The board is free. All of it: every posting, every employer name, every apply link, no account, no card, no "unlock the company name". A free account makes it pageable and mails you a weekly digest.
What costs money is being early. Pro readers see a role the hour it lands. Everyone else sees it a week later, and gets alerted weekly rather than within the hour. That is the entire paywall, and it is the honest one. I did not write these postings and I will not hide them from you. Being in front of them first is the thing I actually built, so that is the thing I sell.
If you are reading this on a Friday afternoon, having just found a role you are perfect for that has been open since Tuesday: I know. That is exactly why this exists.
