Handbook · Chapter 7
Reading a job description
About 70% of a posting is boilerplate. Knowing where the other 30% lives changes how you apply.
Across 1,091 job descriptions parsed for this site, the striking thing is how little of the text carries information. Requirements sections are near-identical across companies and levels. The signal is concentrated in four narrow bands, and once you know where they are you can triage a posting in ninety seconds.
The charter sentence
Usually one line near the top, and it is the only sentence written specifically for this team. “You will help enterprise customers deploy agents into regulated environments” and “You will improve retrieval quality for our search product” are two entirely different jobs that will otherwise share 80% of their text. If you cannot find a charter sentence, that is itself a signal — the team may not know what it is for.
Seniority verbs beat titles
| The verbs | What it means | Read it as |
|---|---|---|
| support, assist, contribute to, help | someone else owns the outcome | below the stated title |
| build, implement, deliver, maintain | you own execution on a defined thing | at the stated title |
| own, drive, define, set direction | you own the outcome and the definition | at or above the stated title |
| influence, align, partner across | the work is mostly organisational | a lead role wearing an IC title |
This matters most where titles are deliberately flat. Member of Technical Staff carries no level information at all, so the verbs are all you have — and the same is true of any posting at a company with a compressed ladder.
The named stack
Three to six tools, and the rest is noise
Long technology lists are written by committee and mean little. What matters is which tools appear in the responsibilities rather than the requirements, because those are the ones the team actually runs. A JD that names Kubernetes once in a bulleted list of twelve technologies is not a Kubernetes job; one that says “you will own our multi-tenant Kubernetes platform” is.
Cross-check against the base rates
The atlas gives you the market's frequencies, which turn a JD from an isolated document into a data point. If a posting names CUDA, distributed training and RLHF, you are in the ~5% frontier band and should prepare accordingly. If it names agents, evals and customer-facing work, you are in the ~60% applied band, and preparing for the frontier band will cost you the interview.
Compensation, and the geographic asymmetry
Across 592 US postings the corpus held 1,237 published salary figures. Across 72 Indian postings it held zero. That is not a collection artefact — Indian postings simply do not publish bands.
- In a US process the band is public, so the negotiation is about where in it you land. Read the band before the first call and calibrate your ask to the top third if your evidence supports it.
- In an Indian process the band is private and the first number is frequently anchored to your current salary. The highest-leverage move is to decline to disclose current compensation and state a target instead — and to do it in the recruiter screen, not later.
Triage in ninety seconds
- Find the charter sentence. If there isn't one, deprioritise.
- Scan the responsibilities for tools; ignore the requirements list.
- Classify the verbs. Decide the real level.
- Match to an archetype in the atlas, and check whether its base rates fit what the JD names.
- Check for the red flags listed on that archetype's card.
- Only then decide whether to spend an evening on the application.