job-search-mcp

Personal MCP server (stdio) that aggregates job listings from Remotive and Arbeitnow, with local SQLite caching, application tracking, and saved searches.

Setup

npm install
npm run build        # emits dist/
npm test             # 27 tests
npm run typecheck

Requires Node 20+. The cache DB lives at ~/.job-search-mcp/jobs.db (override with JOB_SEARCH_MCP_DB).

Related MCP server: trackly-cli

Environment variables

No API keys needed — both providers are public.

Register in Claude Desktop

claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "job-search": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/job-search-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Register in Claude Code

claude mcp add job-search \
  -- node /absolute/path/to/job-search-mcp/dist/index.js

Tools & example prompts

Job ids look like remotive:2091062 / arbeitnow:<slug> and appear in every search result block.

Smoke test

node smoke.mjs spins up the built server over stdio and exercises every tool against the live APIs (uses a throwaway DB at /tmp/job-search-smoke.db).

Provider quirks discovered during development

• Remotive (https://remotive.com/api/remote-jobs): endpoint as documented. publication_date has no timezone suffix (treated as UTC). salary is a free-text string — parsed best-effort into min/max/currency. Descriptions are heavy HTML (Tailwind inline styles) — stripped and truncated to ~1500 chars. Remotive asks not to poll aggressively, so responses are cached in-memory for 15 minutes per query on top of the SQLite cache.

• Arbeitnow (https://www.arbeitnow.com/api/job-board-api): endpoint as documented; remote and visa_sponsorship params work. Undocumented: a search query param is honored by the API (visible in its pagination links) — used here, plus a client-side all-terms filter as a safety net since server-side matching is loose. created_at is a unix timestamp. Heavily German-market (many listings in German). Paginated via links.next; the adapter fetches up to 3 pages.

Discrepancies vs. the original spec: none for endpoints — both matched their docs. The only additions are the undocumented Arbeitnow search param (used) and the Remotive no-timezone date quirk (handled).