Selected work
In active development2026 - Present

FirstSeen

A freshness-first, direct-to-employer job discovery and matching system.

Independent Software Engineer

FirstSeen discovers software roles from official employer systems, verifies each listing at the source, applies deterministic eligibility rules, and presents a private, explainable queue for referral and application workflows.

01 / Problem

Most job feeds optimize for volume, not freshness or proof.

Aggregator listings can be stale, duplicated, or detached from the employer source. FirstSeen treats the employer or its official applicant-tracking system as the authority and keeps posted, detected, and last-verified time separate.

02 / System

Discovery is a durable data pipeline before it is a feed.

The system connects to official Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Recruitee, Pinpoint, and reviewed structured sources. It normalizes listings into canonical identities, tracks material changes and closures, and schedules the oldest-due sources fairly through durable workers.

  • Conditional requests, bounded outbound HTTP, retries, and provider diagnostics.
  • Duplicate-safe transitions and no unchanged AI reanalysis.
  • Twelve role/location discovery cohorts on a recurring schedule.
  • Private per-user overlays over canonical job supply.

03 / Matching

Hard eligibility comes before model judgment.

Full-time status, experience, clearance, sponsorship, role, and location rules are evaluated deterministically before schema-constrained AI analysis. The interface exposes ten ranking dimensions instead of collapsing every decision into an opaque score.

AI processing is reserved for new or materially changed plausible roles and protected by durable budget reservation and validation.

04 / Current state

Private production software, still being hardened.

The authenticated portal is deployed with Supabase, Inngest, Vercel, Slack, Web Push, and optional privacy-redacted observability. It deliberately never auto-applies, reads email, scrapes LinkedIn or Indeed, contacts referrals, or bypasses a CAPTCHA.

FirstSeen remains in active development, so this page documents verified architecture rather than presenting unfinished work as a public product launch.

System shape

A boundary at every handoff.

The system is easier to trust when each stage has one clear responsibility and the next stage receives a smaller, more structured problem.

  1. 01Official ATS connectors
  2. 02Canonical listing identity
  3. 03Deterministic eligibility
  4. 04Bounded AI analysis
  5. 05Explainable ranking
  6. 06Private workflow queue