I built a job board that scores how 'real' each listing is (A–F)

Most remote job listings are ghosts — already filled, never opened, or posted just to farm résumés. As a developer, that annoyed me enough to solve it with code instead of complaining about it on X . So I built Remoty.work , which grades every listing A–F on how likely it is to be real . Here's how the detection actually works under the hood. The problem, from an engineering angle Job boards are an endless scrape loop. Board A scrapes Board B, which scraped Board C. The same dead listing propagates across a dozen sites, and none of them verify anything. There's no signal for "is this real," so the noise compounds until every board looks identical. I didn't want to build board number thirteen in that loop. I wanted a layer on top that answers one question every listing should have to: is anyone actually going to read my application? The architecture Everything runs on a single VPS — Postgres, scrapers, and the scoring jobs, supervised on a schedule. Deliberately boring. High level: Ingestion: scheduled scrapers pull from source boards and company ATS feeds into Postgres. Each raw listing is deduplicated by a fingerprint (title + company + normalized URL) so the same job reposted across five boards collapses into one row with a repost_count . Scoring engine: every listing gets a ghost-risk score from a handful of signals, then mapped to an A–F grade so it's human-readable, not a black-box number. The "rant" signal: I cross-reference what people say about companies in places like r/recruitinghell and hiring threads. That's where the truth about a company's hiring leaks out, and it turns out to be a strong predictor. Agents: I use DeepSeek to classify and summarize the messy text job descriptions, company chatter. DeepSeek because running this over thousands of listings every night on GPT-4-class models would have killed the unit economics before I had a single user. One infra detail I didn't expect to spend a weekend on: the frontend is on Cloudflare's edge, but the ed