Visapp - Sponsored Jobs Explorer
Tool to scrape and present jobs that UK Tier 2 visa holders are eligible for
Background
Back in 2018 holders of Tier 2 & Tier 5 visas in the UK could only access the list of potential sponsors by checking a PDF on the Home Office’s website. The lack of any filtering functionality made it extremely difficult to find companies within the holder’s industry, field or close to their home. Additionally, companies themselves often do not know if they hold a valid status of a sponsor. This means that most of the time one would need to cross-check each application with the sponsor list before applying.
Overview
To fix this problem I built a simple UI with a scraper underneath. It would parse the PDF file from Home Office’s website, extract all companies and dump them into a database. It would periodically run the scraper to make sure the list is up to date.
The other part of the scraper would visit some common job sites, and try to do fuzzy matching between the job’s listed company and ones in the database. If a match is found, the job would then be added under the company’s name in the application and displayed. The user could then filter through the app’s content by category, location, company name and see what positions are available at which companies.
Development
Built utilising serverless technologies - AWS Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront - the app also uses EC2 for daily scraping of sponsors and jobs. Those are converted by a set of scripts to fuzzy match company names to sponsor names, then saved to S3 for archiving as well as pushed into an RDS. The whole setup was designed to take advantage of AWS Free Tier while providing scalable & highly available infrastructure.