How First Silicon finds and labels roles

Sources

First Silicon only reads job boards that employers publish for anyone to see:

• Greenhouse Job Board API: Greenhouse documents that job board data is public and that its GET endpoints need no authentication.
• Lever Postings API: published postings are publicly viewable.
• Ashby public job posting API.

The fetcher identifies itself with the User-Agent FirstSiliconBot/1.0 (+https://firstsilicon.pages.dev/how-it-works/; daily fetch of public job-board APIs), requests one board at a time with a pause between requests, uses timeouts, retries politely with backoff (and honors Retry-After), and never logs in or submits anything.

Update cadence

A scheduled job runs once a day (around 6 a.m. U.S. Central). The last run finished on September 24, 2026: 88 of 89 boards answered and 15,969 postings were read. Roles that disappear from an employer's board are removed on the next run. If a board fails to answer, its roles are kept for up to 7 days and marked "board unreachable today" rather than dropped.

What is stored

For each role: title, employer, locations, workplace type, dates, the link to the original posting, the labels, and at most a 300-character excerpt of the sentences that explain the labels. Full job descriptions are read only in memory to compute labels; they are not stored or republished.

How labels are computed

• Internship or co-op: the title says intern, internship, co-op or student (a German "Werkstudent" counts), or the job board marks the role as an internship. Titles like "Internal tools" or "International trade" are excluded, as are recruiter roles that merely mention interns.
• Hardware relevance: a 0 to 100 score from hardware terms in the title and description. Pure software, data, marketing and finance roles are excluded unless the title is embedded, firmware, robotics or similar hardware-facing work.
• Discipline tags: ten hardware disciplines, matched from the title first and the description second. See the discipline guides.
• Class year: Fr/So friendly when the text mentions first-year, freshman, sophomore, second-year, rising sophomore or junior, all class years, a 2029 to 2030 graduation date, or an early-insight style program. Juniors+ when it requires junior or senior standing, graduation by 2027 to 2028, or a graduate degree. Negations such as "freshmen are not eligible" count as Juniors+. These years move forward each July.
• Flags: U.S. citizenship, U.S. person or permanent residency, ITAR or export control, security clearance, and "no visa sponsorship", detected sentence by sentence while ignoring equal-opportunity boilerplate.
• Duplicates: the same title at the same employer is merged into one row with all its locations, even when it appears on two boards.

Limits

Labels come from pattern matching, not a person reading every posting. On 40 hand-written test cases set aside after the rules were tuned, 94% of label checks matched a person's judgment the first time they were scored. Real postings are messier than test cases, so treat labels as hints. Employers on other hiring systems (Workday, iCIMS and others) are not included yet, and postings that hide requirements in an attachment or application form cannot be labeled.

Always verify on the employer's page. If a label is wrong or you want a posting or company removed, tell us.

Employers checked (89)

These employers had a public Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby board when their boards were last checked. 71 more hardware employers are on the watch list but use a hiring system First Silicon does not read, or no public board was found.