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How this board gets its listings
soften.dev lists software and technology roles for Azerbaijan and the wider Caucasus, and nothing else. That leaves an obvious question, which most job boards answer nowhere: where do the postings actually come from? This is the whole of it.
Two kinds of listing
There are two, and they are marked differently on every card and every page.
- Employer postings are submitted directly by the company hiring. They are free to post while the board is new, and a person reads each one before it is published — which is what keeps advance-fee schemes and recruitment-pyramid pitches off a board that charges nothing to post on.
- Aggregated listings are collected from other public job boards. Each one names the board it came from and links to the original posting, and applying takes you there rather than to any form here.
The great majority of what is on the site today is aggregated. That is stated on the about page and in the file this site publishes for AI crawlers, for the same reason it is stated here: this is a new board, an empty one helps nobody, and a catalogue that is mostly other people's postings is a fact a reader is entitled to have before they trust the site rather than after.
Where the aggregated ones arrive
Through one licensed feed, which is credited in the footer of every page on this site. It is a wholesaler: it carries the postings of many separate job boards over a single documented interface, so what used to be a crawler walking somebody else's markup one page at a time is now one authenticated request.
The feed is credited at the level of the site and never as the source of an individual listing, and that distinction is deliberate. A candidate applying to an aggregated role is sent to the board that published it; the machine-readable provenance on the listing page points at that same board. Naming the wholesaler on the listing would be false, so a listing names the board a person is actually applying through.
Why every row is reclassified
The feed publishes a category for each posting, and it is not trusted. Aggregators pass each source board's own taxonomy through unchanged, so that field is only as trustworthy as the least careful board behind it — and a tech-only board that inherits somebody else's idea of "IT" stops being tech-only quietly. Every posting is therefore classified here, against this board's own rules, from what the posting is called; anything that is not a technology role is dropped rather than filed under a heading nobody reads. The source's category is consulted only as a last resort, and only for the few values specific enough to mean something on their own, when the title itself matches nothing at all.
The classifier is tuned to be strict rather than generous, and the reason is asymmetry: a genuine role wrongly dropped is invisible and costs one listing, while a non-technical role wrongly kept is visible on every filter that includes it and teaches every visitor that the filters lie. The second failure is far more expensive than the first, so the rules are set to make the first one instead.
Nothing is fetched on demand
Loading a page here does not call anyone. Ingestion runs on its own schedule, writes to this board's database, and every page a visitor sees is rendered from that — which is why the site stays up and stays fast when an upstream board does not, and why no visitor's request is ever forwarded to a third party to be served.
How a listing leaves
Absence is the only take-down signal an aggregated listing has. Nobody upstream announces that a role was filled; the posting simply stops being re-confirmed, so a listing that stops appearing in the feed is retired here rather than left standing. A posting whose term has run out is not left looking open either: its page says the position is closed, and the URL tells a search engine the document is permanently gone instead of quietly serving something else.
And a listing can always be removed by asking. If a role here is wrong, already filled, or should not be published — including by the employer or the board whose posting was aggregated — use the contact form and it is taken down, with no explanation needed.
Next: how applying works here, which is the other half of this — what the site holds, what it does not, and where an application actually goes. Or start from the open positions, or the disciplines.