careers-at-gov-mcp

A TypeScript Model Context Protocol server (stdio transport) for the Singapore public-service job board Careers@Gov. It lets an MCP client search, filter and read public-service job postings.

Tools

All tools are read-only and idempotent, and return both a readable text summary and structuredContent (with an outputSchema).

Organisation and job-function names are matched case-insensitively against the live lists; unknown values return an error with close matches.

How it works

The site is not server-filtered: the home page embeds every current job (about 2,200) in its Next.js RSC payload (self.__next_f), and filtering, sorting and pagination run in the browser. This server fetches that page once, parses the embedded jobs, agencies and departments arrays, caches them in memory for 10 minutes (concurrent requests share one fetch), and applies the website's filter, sort and pagination rules locally. get_job fetches one detail page and reads its RSC jobDetail object (falling back to the JobPosting JSON-LD block).

Requests use a Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; careers-at-gov-mcp/0.1; +https://github.com/emansih/) user agent (the URL is the maintainer contact): the site's firewall returns 403 on detail pages for user agents that don't start with Mozilla/5.0.

Search ranking caveat

The website sends the search query to Algolia from the browser, which this server does not call. Free-text search is implemented locally: the query is split into words, every word must prefix-match (e.g. analys matches analyst) the title, organisation, job function or one-line summary, and title matches rank highest (exact title, then phrase in title, then all words in title, then words spread across fields). Ranking approximates the website's and result counts will differ from it when a query is used. Filter-only searches (no query) match the website exactly. Salary ranges are not published in the listing data at the time of writing, so salaryRange is usually absent.

Related MCP server: Arbeitnow Scout MCP

Install

Published on npm as careers-at-gov-mcp. Requires Node.js 20+. No API key needed.

npx -y careers-at-gov-mcp          # run on demand
npm install -g careers-at-gov-mcp  # or install globally

Build from source

pnpm install
pnpm build

Run

pnpm start          # run the built server (stdio)
pnpm dev            # run from source with tsx (watch mode)
pnpm inspect        # open the MCP Inspector against build/index.js

The server logs to stderr only; stdout carries the JSON-RPC stream. Requires Node 20 or newer (global fetch).

Add to Claude Code

claude mcp add careers-at-gov -- npx -y careers-at-gov-mcp

On Windows (native, not WSL), wrap it with cmd /c: claude mcp add careers-at-gov -- cmd /c npx -y careers-at-gov-mcp.

Add to Claude Desktop

In claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "careers-at-gov": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "careers-at-gov-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

On Windows, use "command": "cmd" and "args": ["/c", "npx", "-y", "careers-at-gov-mcp"].

Layout

• src/careers/ - fetching, RSC parsing, dataset cache, filters, local search, HTML-to-text.

• src/tools/ - one file per tool, registered in src/tools/index.ts.

Adding a tool

Create src/tools/<name>.ts using defineTool(...) (read-only, idempotent, open-world annotations by default) and add it to the list in src/tools/index.ts.

Be polite to the site: it is a government service, so keep request rates low (the in-memory cache means one listing fetch per 10 minutes).