I Built an AI Job Hunter That Runs While I Sleep.

Owais Multani — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 23:39:25 +0000

You find an interesting job. Open the description. Compare it against your experience. Update your resume. Write a cover letter. Answer the application questions. Submit everything.

Then repeat it for the next job.

And the next.

Somewhere along the way, you're also supposed to prepare for interviews, follow up with recruiters, learn new skills, and keep track of where you've applied.

The more seriously you take your job search, the more it starts to feel like a second full-time job.

I started building NextRole AI because I wanted to change that.

After working on it for a while, I'm excited to finally open it up to everyone.

Meet NextRole AI — a free, open-source career workspace designed to help you find opportunities, prepare applications, navigate interviews, and take your next career step.

🌐 Try NextRole AI

💻 Explore the source code on GitHub

I didn't want another AI resume generator

There are already plenty of tools that can rewrite your resume, generate a cover letter, or tell you how closely your skills match a job description.

Those features are useful, but they only address small parts of a much bigger process.

I wanted to connect those parts.

What if the same platform that discovers a job could also understand your background, prepare relevant application materials, help you get ready for an interview, and remember what you learned afterward?

And what if you didn't have to start from scratch every time?

That became the direction for NextRole AI.

Meet your career team

The idea is simple: instead of juggling a collection of disconnected tools, you have one place to manage your career journey.

NextRole AI organizes that experience around six specialists.

The Scout — Find opportunities worth your time

Set your target roles and preferences, and NextRole can discover opportunities from job boards, company career pages, and web search.

The discovery pipeline supports 11 job-search sources and eight types of company applicant-tracking systems, including Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, and Workday.

Rather than simply handing you another endless list of links, it helps filter results and keeps a record of what was found, accepted, or skipped.

You can schedule discovery and let the platform look for new opportunities.

The Writer — Prepare applications that actually reflect you

Once you find an interesting position, NextRole can prepare a job-specific resume, cover letter, and application answers.

But there's a rule I wanted to preserve:

AI shouldn't invent your experience to make you look like a better match.

The tailoring process works from your existing resume. It can reorganize and rephrase supported experience, but it includes checks against introducing unsupported figures and skills.

If a job requires something your resume doesn't demonstrate, that should be visible as a gap, not silently added as an achievement.

You review the output and decide what to use.

The Editor — Make your experience presentable

NextRole builds on the resume-editing foundation of Reactive Resume.

You get a full resume editor with templates, layout controls, imports, exports, and tools for reviewing readability and job alignment.

The goal is to make it easy to maintain a strong baseline resume and create relevant versions without rebuilding the document every time.

The Coach — Prepare for the conversation, not just the application

Getting an interview is only part of the challenge.

NextRole includes interview preparation, practice, coaching, and debriefing features.

You can work through preparation plans, practise answering questions, and capture what happened afterward.

I think this part of the process deserves far more attention than it usually gets.

The Tracker — Know where everything stands

Applications, interviews, follow-ups, recruiter conversations, and deadlines become difficult to manage when they're scattered across emails, calendars, and spreadsheets.

NextRole brings applications into one workspace with different ways to view progress and organize what needs attention.

The Advisor — Make better decisions when offers arrive

The process doesn't end when you get an offer.

NextRole also includes offer-comparison tools to help you evaluate opportunities against your preferences and identify information you still need before making a decision.

The bigger idea: don't just apply to more jobs. Become a better candidate.

This is the part I'm most interested in exploring.

Think about what happens during a typical job search.

You might review dozens of job descriptions and notice the same missing technical skill again and again.

You might reach several interviews but struggle with a particular kind of question.

You might discover that your resume communicates some of your experience poorly, even though you've done the work.

Those are useful signals.

But where do they go?

Usually, nowhere.

You close the browser tab, move on to another opportunity, and repeat the process.

I want NextRole AI to make that information useful.

Today, the platform already has a personal knowledge base, interview preparation, debriefing, and application-tracking capabilities.

The longer-term vision is to connect those pieces into a meaningful feedback loop.

Your job search should help you understand:

Which skills employers repeatedly ask for and where your experience has gaps.
Which parts of your background are most relevant to the opportunities you want.
What you can improve in your interview preparation.
Where to focus your learning instead of trying to learn everything.

Imagine looking back after a month of searching and having more than a list of applications.

You have a clearer picture of the market you're targeting, the evidence you can present, and the areas where investing your time could make a real difference.

That's the direction I want to take this project.

I don't want to claim that the platform already learns autonomously from every application outcome. Building that kind of reliable, useful feedback system is an ongoing part of the work.

But I think it can become one of the most valuable parts of the experience.

Automation is useful. Losing control isn't.

There's a lot of excitement around autonomous AI agents, and I've been experimenting with how much work can be delegated safely.

But I don't think every action should be automated just because it's technically possible.

For example, I want NextRole to prepare application materials in the background.

I don't want it inventing achievements, silently spending unlimited amounts on model calls, or submitting applications without your knowledge.

That's why the platform emphasizes reviewable outputs, explicit decisions, and visibility into what the automation has done.

It's supposed to take repetitive work off your plate, not make important career decisions for you.

Why open source?

I could have built another closed AI subscription product.

But job searching involves personal information: your employment history, achievements, skills, interviews, and career goals.

I believe people should have more control over tools that handle that information.

So NextRole AI is open source under the MIT license.

You can run the hosted application, inspect the code, or self-host it.

It supports bring-your-own AI providers, including services such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and compatible model endpoints.

The project also provides APIs and MCP integrations for developers who want to connect it to their own workflows.

And because the source is public, you can see how the platform works instead of taking its claims on faith.

Built on the shoulders of open source

NextRole AI started as an extension of Reactive Resume, an open-source project created by Amruth Pillai and its contributors.

Reactive Resume provides much of the foundation, including the resume editor, authentication, AI integration capabilities, and several career-management features.

My work has focused on extending that foundation with broader job-source discovery, automated application preparation, output guardrails, and greater visibility into background activity.

I think being clear about that matters. Open source gets better when we acknowledge the projects that made our own work possible.

A little about the technology

For developers curious about what's running underneath, NextRole AI uses React, TypeScript, Hono, PostgreSQL, Redis, and a typed API layer.

The background discovery and preparation pipelines use scheduled workers and database coordination rather than a conventional multi-agent orchestration framework.

It also supports Docker-based self-hosting, with deployment options for other environments.

I plan to write separate technical articles about job-source adapters, background processing, resume-tailoring guardrails, and the engineering lessons from building the system.

This post, though, is about introducing the product rather than walking through its internals.

It's live, and there's still plenty to improve

NextRole AI is available to try today.

The core features are in place, but it's still an evolving project.

There are job sources I'd like to support, discovery results I'd like to improve, and more ways I want to connect application outcomes with personal growth.

AI-assisted features require configuring an AI provider, and the hosted demo currently uses a daily background schedule. Self-hosting allows more frequent scheduler ticks.

I used AI coding assistance during development as well. The code, tests, and implementation decisions are available in the repository for anyone who wants to explore them.

I'm sharing the project now because I think real feedback will be more useful than spending another few months polishing things in isolation.

Try NextRole AI

If you're currently looking for a job, I'd love to know whether it actually makes the process easier.

If you're a developer, I'd love feedback on the architecture, integrations, reliability, and opportunities to contribute.

And if you're experimenting with AI agents, I'm especially interested in how you think an application like this should balance autonomy, personalization, and user control.

Try the app: https://nextroleai.owaism.xyz

GitHub: https://github.com/owaismultani/nextrole-ai

Issues, feedback, and pull requests are welcome. If the project is useful to you, consider starring the repository so you can follow its development.

I'll be sharing more about the technical decisions, challenges, and improvements as I continue building it.

One question I'd love to hear your thoughts on:

If an AI career assistant could learn one thing from your job search to help you improve, what should it be?

NextRole AI is open source and built on Reactive Resume. The goal isn't to replace human judgment in the job search — it's to make the process more manageable, more informed, and ultimately more useful for the person going through it.

DEV Community: Owais Multani