Mission control for leaving the country

Moving abroad is a search problem with terrible tooling. Scholarships live in scrapers' nightmares, deadlines hide in PDFs, and every program wants a slightly different version of you. After weeks of tab chaos, I did what any reasonable engineer would do: I built my own mission control.

The system watches for me. Scrapers and inbox watchers pull in scholarship and job opportunities; an LLM extraction layer turns unstructured announcements into clean, typed records; a scoring engine ranks everything against my actual preferences — countries, fields, funding quality, dealbreakers. A drafting workspace generates first drafts of CVs and cover letters from a single profile that acts as the source of truth about me, so I stop retyping my life into forms.

The most interesting engineering wasn't the happy path; it was defending the pipeline from its own inputs. Every scraped announcement is untrusted content, so extraction agents carry no tools, output JSON only against strict schemas, and personal data gets redacted before anything reaches an external model. One failing source can never take down the rest.

It runs quietly on a server, and every morning the question changed from "what am I missing?" to "what's next?" I built it not to make the dream easier, exactly, but to make it legible.