Two years ago I was job hunting and hit the same wall everyone hits: most listings don't show salary. You apply, do a phone screen, do a technical interview, and 4 hours of your life later you find out the budget is 30% below what you needed.

So we built Koalaified — a job board for tech professionals that shows a salary range on every listing. Either the employer's disclosed range, or a clearly-labeled market-rate estimate when they don't disclose.

Here's what we learned building it.

The data problem is harder than it looks

The obvious approach: aggregate job listings, extract salary data when it exists. But only ~40% of listings in our dataset include an explicit range. For the other 60%, we built a model that estimates salary based on role title, seniority level (extracted from the JD), location, and company type — cross-referenced against BLS occupational stats.

The key UX decision: always label which type of salary is shown. Employer disclosed vs. our estimate.…