> About PhD Sky

An open-source aggregator for academic positions on Bluesky.

What this is

PhD Sky aggregates PhD, postdoc, and research-position announcements posted to Bluesky by researchers, labs, and academic institutions. The catalog is updated four times a day and currently lists more than 5,000 active positions across biology, computer science, ecology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, psychology, the humanities, and other fields.

The site is free, ad-free, requires no signup, and has no signups, forms, or comments — it's a read-only browse experience.

How it works

  1. Fetch. Eleven academic search queries run against the Bluesky AT Protocol API: terms like "PhD position", "postdoc opportunity", "funded studentship", "research assistant" across English-language posts.
  2. Filter (LLM). Llama 4 Maverick (via the NVIDIA NIM API) reads each candidate post and decides whether it's a genuine position announcement. Posts that pass are tagged with up to three academic disciplines, a country, and a position type (PhD Student, Postdoc, Master Student, Research Assistant).
  3. Deduplicate. A two-stage pipeline removes reposts of the same position: TF-IDF similarity flags candidates above 0.25, then the LLM verifies anything in the 0.25–0.95 zone. Anything ≥ 0.95 is auto-merged. The newer post wins; older ones become "earlier posts" linked from the canonical card.
  4. Publish. Verified, deduplicated positions land in a Postgres database and are baked into a static JSON snapshot (/positions.json) plus per-job pages (/p/<slug>) on every cron run, so the site loads fast and stays cheap.

Data source

Every position links back to the original Bluesky post. We don't paraphrase, rehost the message text, or claim authorship — only the original poster decides what to publish. To request removal of your own post from this aggregator, see the contact link below.

Listings are user-generated and not verified by us. Always confirm details (deadlines, funding, eligibility, supervisor) directly with the posting institution before applying.

Open source

The full pipeline (search, filter, dedup, publish) is open source on GitHub. Issues and pull requests welcome.

Contact

Run by Eli. Spotted a misclassified or incorrect listing? Want your Bluesky post removed from the aggregator? Email eli.eydlin@gmail.com.