How this works
When a company wins a VA technology contract, it usually needs people to deliver on it — and it needs them before the work starts. Federal award data is public, so that hiring signal is visible days or weeks before the job postings appear. This site watches that data and tells you when it moves. Here's exactly where the numbers come from, and where they fall short.
Where the data comes from
Three sources, all public. Nothing here is scraped from behind a login or bought from a vendor.
The Federal Procurement Data System — the government's official record of every contract action.
We read its public ATOM feed, filtered to the VA and the categories below. This is the fastest source: awards usually land here first.
The Treasury-run public spending database, built on the same underlying procurement data.
We query its award-search API for anything FPDS hasn't published yet, and use it to resolve the "Award details" link on each contract.
Industry reporting on government contracting.
Its RSS feed sometimes covers a win before the official record posts. Articles about contracts we already track get attached to that record instead of creating a duplicate.
Records are matched on contract number, so the same award arriving from two sources becomes one entry rather than two.
What gets tracked
Only the Department of Veterans Affairs, and only these NAICS categories — the industry codes the contracting officer assigns to each award:
- 541511Custom computer programming
Software development and engineering services
- 541512Computer systems design
Systems integration and architecture
- 541513Computer facilities management
Running IT operations on the agency's behalf
- 541519Other computer related services
VA's catch-all — the broadest category, and includes hardware resale and medical device buys
- 518210Hosting and data processing
Cloud infrastructure, hosting, data centers
Everything in those categories is ingested. The checkboxes on the awards page filter what you see, and the ones on the signup form filter what you get emailed — they don't change what's collected, so widening your interests later costs you nothing.
We keep new awards only. Modifications to existing contracts, option-year exercises, and administrative changes are filtered out, because those rarely signal fresh hiring.
How often it updates
Every six hours. Each run looks back 45 days rather than only since the last check, so a record that posts late still gets picked up. Re-reading the same award is harmless — it's matched and skipped.
The current state of the feed is always visible at /api/health, including when the last run finished and how many awards it added.
From an award to an actual job
An award tells you a company just took on work. It doesn't tell you where to apply. So for each winner we try to resolve a real careers page, and we verify it before trusting it: we follow redirects, confirm we landed on the company's own domain or a known applicant-tracking system, and check the page actually reads like a careers page. Pages that fail get dropped rather than shown.
When we don't have a verified page, the link becomes a targeted web search for that company's openings instead of sending you somewhere wrong.
What you get emailed
Instant, daily, or weekly — your choice, changeable from the link at the bottom of any alert. Each email lists the new awards in your selected categories, with the value, what the contract is for, and a direct link to the winner's careers page.
You're never sent the same award twice, and unsubscribing is one click with no login.
What this can't tell you
The data is authoritative, but it's procurement data — it was built to track federal spending, not to advertise jobs. The gaps matter:
An award is not a job posting
Winning work doesn't guarantee hiring. Incumbents often staff a renewal with people already on the payroll, and plenty of awards are for hardware, licenses, or software with little new labor attached. Treat an alert as a strong lead, not a confirmed opening.
The dollar figure is a ceiling, not a spend
We show base value plus all options — the most the contract could pay out over its full life. Many awards, especially IDIQs and blanket agreements, never obligate anything close to that. A large number means large potential scope, not money already committed.
There's a reporting lag
Agencies report contract actions after the fact, and the records routinely appear days after signing — sometimes longer around fiscal-year end, when award volume spikes. We're early relative to job boards, but we're not real-time relative to the award itself.
The category codes are imperfect
NAICS codes are chosen by the contracting officer, not derived from the work. Code 541519 in particular is a VA catch-all: genuine software projects sit alongside hardware resale and medical-device purchases. Expect some noise in that category specifically.
Prime contractors only
We see who holds the contract, not who they subcontract to. On large awards, much of the hiring happens at partner firms that never appear in this data.
News-sourced entries are thinner
Awards found through industry reporting often lack a contract number or category code. Because they can't be classified, they appear under every category filter rather than being hidden — better to show you an unclassified award than to silently drop it.
Your email address
Used to send you alerts, and nothing else. It isn't sold, shared, or used for anything you didn't ask for. Unsubscribing deletes your record outright rather than flagging it.
Independence
This site isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs or any federal agency. It reads public data and presents it — nothing more.
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