claude-resume-kit/job_scout/ROSTER_REVIEW_2026-08-18.md

Scout roster review — 2026-08-18

Status: implemented 2026-08-18. Sections 1, 2 and 5 have been acted on; see "What was actually done" at the bottom, which also records two findings in this document that turned out to be wrong once the fixes were attempted.

Originally analysis only. Every claim below was verified by probing the live endpoint; unverified candidates are listed separately as probe-worthy, not as recommendations.

Method: aggregated the scan-stats tables from the four most recent full runs (2026-07-14, 07-27, 08-07, 08-18), cross-referenced state/decisions.json (253 decisions), and live-probed candidate ATS endpoints.

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1. Three scrapers are silently broken

Same failure class as the dbt Labs 404 fixed earlier today, but worse: these return HTTP 200 and plausible-looking rows, so the report shows "0 matches" and nothing looks wrong. A company that scrapes garbage is indistinguishable from a company with no openings.

Company	What it actually returns	Verified
Roche	Shanghai, Kyiv, Petaling Jaya, Bogota, Berlin, Mannheim, Penzberg. Zero Swiss roles despite Basel HQ — the locationsearch=Switzerland URL param is being ignored and an unfiltered default page is scraped.	live scrape, 10/10 rows non-CH
Meta	1 row: "Research Scientist Intern, AI/ML, Core Ads Growth (PhD)". Meta Zurich is a real engineering office. The offices[0]=Zurich filter or the lazy-load scroll is failing.	live scrape, 4 jobs across 4 runs
Apple	21 rows, all internships, "Where we're hiring", and "US - Specialist: Seasonal, Part-time". Zero actual engineering reqs.	live scrape, all 21 rows

This invalidates a conclusion in the yield data. Apple shows 21 decisions, all skip, 0 signal — that reads as "Apple is a bad fit" but it is really "the scraper only ever saw the internships page." Don't drop Apple on that evidence; fix the scrape first, then judge.

2. Seven boards have no title filter at all

_title_filter is absent on BKW, SBB, BFH, PostFinance, Swissgrid, Novartis, Palantir. This is why reports drown in Mitarbeiter/in Hausdienst, Financial Accountant, Studiengangsleiter Master Physiotherapie, SAP Consultant Treasury.

Company	Eligible → match ≥2 (4 runs)	Reading
BKW	61 / 75 scraped	81% of the entire board "matches"
SBB	27 / 27	100% — filter is doing nothing
BFH	29 / 48	60%
Novartis	105 eligible → 21 match	23 skips vs 3 shortlists

These need a title filter, not removal. BKW/SBB/BFH/PostFinance/Swissgrid are the Bern/Thun WLB-exception tier where below-bar comp is deliberately accepted — the lane is intentional, the noise is not. RUAG already carries a 29-term filter and behaves (13 eligible → 7 match); it is the model to copy.

3. The yield metric in the decisions log is confounded

Raw decision counts reward boards with no title filter — more rows surfaced means more skip rows recorded. Normalising to signal (shortlist+applied+maybe) per eligible role inverts the ranking: Snowflake (5 decisions → 1 applied, 1 shortlist, 1 maybe off 14 eligible) is a far better board than Novartis (31 decisions → 3 shortlists off 105 eligible). Worth keeping in mind before reading the decisions log as a quality signal.

4. Dead lanes

• MET Group + Louis Dreyfus: 1,464 roles scraped across 4 runs → 0 eligible, 0 matches. Ever. Both are title-filtered correctly; they simply have no CH/remote-CH engineering roles. LDC is Geneva/Rotterdam-anchored (French). The commodity-trading lane is configured and producing nothing.
• Norway (Telenor, Equinor, NATO JWC Stavanger) — three of 34 companies on a lane your own notes call mostly closed: comp below the 180k bar, Norwegian at A2, no clearance. Equinor just came back rejected at 79 days. Consolidation candidate, though NATO JWC has an open application pending.

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5. Verified adds — both confirmed live

Amazon / AWS — the single biggest gap

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search.json?normalized_country_code[]=CHE → clean public JSON, 32 CH roles. Among them, live right now:

• Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, AWS Forward Deployed Engineering — Zurich
• Sr. Delivery Consultant – AI/ML, Professional Services — Zurich
• Sr Specialist SA – GenAI, Specialists Team Germany/Switzerland — Zurich
• Senior Security Assurance Solutions Architect, AWS Security Assurance — Zurich

Why this matters more than any other candidate: AWS is the primary cloud in the evidence base (SW-1 migration, the Swisscom data products). claims.json:274 marks GCP evidence: unverified, output: forbidden — which is exactly what hard-gated the two Google GenAI FDE reqs this morning. An AWS-native FDE req in Zurich is the same lane without the cloud gap. Clears the comp bar. No adapter work needed beyond a thin JSON fetcher.

Axpo — the energy-trading lane, finally live

https://careers.axpo.com/jobs.json — Teamtailor on a custom domain. 400 roles, 98 tech-ish. Note the feed is JSON Feed format keyed items, not jobs, so the existing fetch_teamtailor needs a small tweak (and the demo-board fingerprint guard still applies).

Live right now: "Forward Deployed AI Engineer (f/m/d)", plus Senior Application Manager/Solution Architect, Quantitative Modeller, Junior/Financial Data Analyst, Leiter/in IT Division Hydroenergie.

Memory (user_role_targeting_energy_trading) names Axpo and Alpiq explicitly as targets — data/ platform engineering inside a trading shop, not ETRM or quant. Only MET was ever configured, and MET has produced nothing. Axpo is German-speaking (Baden/Zurich), which fits the DE/EN profile that rules out the Geneva traders.

6. Verified negative — do not add

• Coinbase proper. Greenhouse board coinbase is live (169 jobs) but has exactly 2 EMEA-remote roles, both non-engineering (Business Controller, Threat Assessment Manager). The Ventures board removed earlier was portfolio-only, so Coinbase was never really covered — but covering it properly gains nothing. Crypto lane stays Kraken + Bitcoin Suisse.
• Alpiq, Glencore, Swiss Re, Sunrise — no SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, Ashby or Lever board found. Careers sites are bespoke/JS-rendered with no discoverable JSON API in a network trace. Not worth Playwright maintenance on spec.
• The remote-EU data-infra tier as a category (ClickHouse, MongoDB, Redis, Temporal, Airbyte, Starburst…). Skipping this deliberately: Grafana is already on the roster and memory flags it as below-bar geo-fenced comp. These firms band EU-remote salaries the same way, so the whole tier fails the 180k bar regardless of role fit. Elastic/Confluent/Grafana already cover the archetype.

7. Probe-worthy — not yet verified, do not add on my word

• CERN (careers.cern/jobs) — has dedicated "Data Science, AI & Analytics" and "Information Technologies" fields of work. English-working international organisation in CH, i.e. the same lane as the BIS Basel application. Needs a scrape-mechanics check. Best remaining unverified candidate.
• Swiss Post (career.post.ch) — Bern-headquartered, has an "Informatik und Digital Services" category, fits the Bern WLB tier alongside PostFinance (already scraped, and a Swiss Post company). My probe timed out on networkidle; needs a retry with a laxer wait.
• NATO NCIA (ncia.nato.int/careers.html) — the current nato adapter returns 4 reqs, all JWC Stavanger. NCIA is NATO's actual technology arm (Brussels/The Hague/Mons) and is a separate pipeline. Worth checking whether it is separately scrapable — it would be the one way to keep a NATO lane without the Norway constraints.
• SIX Group — fingerprinted as SuccessFactors (career_company=sixgroupse). Zurich financial- market infrastructure. Endpoint pattern is known; content unverified.

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Suggested order of work

1. Fix Roche / Meta / Apple — restores three companies that currently contribute nothing while appearing healthy. Highest value per unit effort, and it's a correctness bug, not a preference.
2. Add Amazon/AWS — trivial adapter, an on-profile Zurich FDE req live today.
3. Add Axpo — small fetch_teamtailor tweak for the items key; opens the energy lane.
4. Add title filters to BKW, SBB, BFH, PostFinance, Swissgrid, Novartis, Palantir.
5. Decide on MET/LDC and the Norway three — a judgment call, not a bug.
6. Probe CERN, Swiss Post, NATO NCIA, SIX.

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What was actually done (2026-08-18)

Implementing the recommendations disproved two of them. Both corrections are recorded here rather than quietly edited above, because the original claims were used to justify the work.

Correction 1 — Meta is NOT broken

Section 1 listed Meta as returning garbage. It does not. metacareers.com itself reports "1 Items" for the Zurich office filter — the board is genuinely near-empty and the scraper reports it accurately. No change made beyond a comment recording the verification, so it is not "fixed" again later. Roche and Apple were real bugs; Meta was not.

Correction 2 — inclusion filters were the wrong instrument

Section 2 recommended adding _title_filter allowlists to seven boards. That was implemented and then reversed, on the objection that an allowlist fails closed: a strong-fit role with a title nobody anticipated is dropped at fetch time, never scored, and appears in no report and no JSON dump. The final call should sit with the scorer and the reviewer, not a keyword gate.

Filtering is now two explicit modes:

Mode	Behaviour	Where
_title_exclude (default)	Fails open — drops only unambiguous non-tech titles (hausdienst, physiotherapie, violine, lehrstelle, legal counsel…). Everything else is scored.	14 boards
_title_filter	Fails closed — allowlist, used only where volume makes full scoring impractical (>~200 roles)	Databricks, Snowflake, Datadog, Elastic, Fivetran, Louis Dreyfus

NOISE_TITLE_EXCLUDE is one shared, board-agnostic list. Terms that could plausibly attach to a technical role (analyst, manager, specialist, consultant, architect, lead) are deliberately excluded from it.

Also corrected: BKW's 61/75 match rate was blamed on the missing filter. The real cause is _score_floor: 2, set deliberately because the English keyword scorer cannot read German titles. The floor was left in place.

Fixes shipped

• Roche — new fetch_phenom adapter (Phenom refineSearch). Was 40 scraped / 0 Swiss; now 133 scraped, 88 CH-eligible, 25 matches.
• Apple — removed default_location: "Switzerland", which was relabelling US "Various Locations" postings as Swiss. Now honestly reports 0 CH-eligible.
• Amazon / AWS — new fetch_amazon adapter. 32 CH roles, 29 eligible, 13 matches, including the Zurich AWS FDE req and a Senior ProServe Cloud Architect in Bern.
• Axpo — fetch_teamtailor extended for custom domains and pagination. 461 roles. Locations now come from the feed's schema.org jobLocation, with ISO alpha-2 expanded to full country names — without that, "Burgdorf, CH" failed the CH keyword match, and a forced default_location would have marked ~380 Madrid/Milan/Warsaw roles as Swiss (the Apple bug again). Telenor gained real locations from the same change.
• Filter modes as described above, plus artificial intelligence, data scientist, data-driven, ai engineer, ai platform, ai architect, ai-systems, data science added to the shared allowlist. Bare "ai" deliberately omitted — it substring-matches Maintenance, Training, Chair.
• Palantir left unfiltered — its entry already documents why (its target titles, e.g. "Deployment Strategist", are not in the allowlist). The original recommendation to filter it would have hidden exactly the roles worth seeing.

Still open (deliberately not done)

• Section 4 judgment calls: MET Group + Louis Dreyfus, and the three Norway companies. These are preference decisions, not bugs.
• Section 7 probes: CERN, Swiss Post, NATO NCIA, SIX Group.