A free, keyless Remote Jobs API I built to stop scraping job boards (5 sources, one call)

#webdev #backend #api #softwaredevelopment

Building something that needs to know "which jobs are out there right now" keeps hitting the same wall: every remote job board is a different scrape, a different HTML layout, a different rate limit, and a different set of dead links.

So I built a single API that normalizes all of it into one call. It's live, free, and requires no API key.

What it is

Remote Jobs API is a small service that aggregates remote roles from five public sources — Remotive, RemoteOK, Jobicy, WeWorkRemotely, and Hacker News (Who's Hiring) — and returns them as one clean, typed feed.

No registration. No API key. No rate-limit handshake. Point a client at an endpoint and you get normalized jobs back.

Why keyless

Most "job APIs" make you sign up, burn through a free quota, and wrap every call in an auth token before you can get a single listing. That friction is fine for a data vendor selling you a dashboard. It's hostile if you just want to build a tool, a demo, a newsletter digest, or an AI agent that needs to see current openings.

I wanted the opposite: the lowest-possible-friction way to say "give me remote jobs." So the design constraint was zero setup. If a call can't be made with a plain curl, it's not finished.

The shape of the data

Each job is normalized to a small, predictable object. What varies wildly across source sites (title casing, salary formats, remote-region wording) is flattened to a consistent schema:

{
  "title":   "Data Scientist III - Temporary",
  "company": "Veracyte",
  "salary":  "USD 63-72 / hourly",
  "url":     "https://jobicy.com/jobs/154571-..."
}

The health endpoint tells you how much is live at any moment:

GET /health
{ "status": "ok", "sources": ["remotive","remoteok","jobicy","wwr","hn"],
  "count_live": 339 }

That's 339 live roles across the five sources, each with a real company name, a normalized salary string when the source provides one, and a working apply URL.

What it's for (and what it isn't)

This is not a replacement for a job board. It won't email you, track applications, or rank roles. It's a data substrate: a cheap, structured feed of currently-live remote openings you can pipe into your own thing.

Concretely, it fits:

Job alerts / career-page monitors that need a broad, deduplicated pool to diff against — one call normalizes title + skills + salary across many sources instead of scraping each.
AI agents and auto-apply tooling that need to match a candidate profile against real open roles without maintaining a per-site scraper stack.
Dashboards, digests, and newsletters that want a "here's what's remote today" section without owning the crawling.
Self-hosting — the project is MIT and public, so if you'd rather run your own copy of the aggregation against sources you choose, you can.

The honest caveats

Salaries are best-effort. Only some sources expose them, so the field is sometimes empty or approximate.
It's a snapshot. The feed reflects what's live at scrape time; a role can close between calls.
Coverage is the five sources above. It's a starting pool, not the whole internet.

The one-call proof

If you want to see it live right now, this is the entire client:

curl https://remote-jobs-api.tten.no/v1/jobs?limit=3

You'll get back three real, currently-posted remote jobs with company, salary, and apply URL — no token, no signup.

That's the whole pitch: one endpoint, no key, normalized remote jobs. If you're building something that needs to know what's out there, try it as the data layer and tell me where it breaks.

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