"Remote" doesn't mean "anywhere": I built an API that checks if you can actually apply

A remote job listing can have confusing eligibility requirements that obscure who can actually apply. To tackle this issue, I developed an API called Remote Jobs by Country. This API pulls job postings from popular platforms like Himalayas, Remote OK, We Work Remotely and Jobicy, and determines if someone residing in a specific country can apply for each job. The challenge was that each platform describes eligibility differently.

Himalayas provides a list of country names and UTC offsets for remote work locations, while Jobicy presents free text indicating eligible regions. We Work Remotely uses a region label (e.g., "Anywhere in the World") and a country field with flag emojis. Remote OK often leaves the location field empty, adding another layer of ambiguity.

To handle these variations, I created a Geo parser that converts all formats into a consistent structure. The Geo class stores whether the location is worldwide, a set of ISO2 codes for countries, regions (like APAC, EMEA, etc.), excluded regions (e.g., not the US, Canada, UK), UTC offsets, and a basis indicating the source of the location information.

The API's `open_to()` function checks if a given country and UTC offset can apply to a job, returning "yes," "no," or "unclear." Challenges arose from the fact that "CA" doesn't always refer to Canada, and "IN" can sometimes stand for India instead of "India." To avoid false positives, two-letter country codes are only accepted from a limited set (US, UK, UAE), and they must be in uppercase. The only exception is when a job explicitly excludes certain countries, in which case the list is treated as non-negotiable.

Some listings have no time zone restrictions, and those with a vague "anywhere" requirement must be analyzed from the job description itself. The API extracts sentences from the job description stating where applicants must reside and uses those sentences as evidence. If no such sentence exists, the API marks the eligibility as unclear.

The API also deduplicates jobs across platforms, adds visa sponsorship tags, carries attribution strings for each board, and has a monitoring mode that only charges for new jobs. The source data comes exclusively from the boards' public APIs and RSS feeds, adhering to their usage terms. Four sister actors provide similar functionality for company career pages and Workday job listings, ensuring comprehensive coverage of remote work opportunities.