Why I Built Noble Search, and Why the Public Version Is Free

I built Noble Search because I needed it. Then I decided to give the public version away. This post covers both halves: why it exists, and why the version anyone can download costs nothing.

Short version first. Noble Search is a job search portal for transitioning military members and veterans. It runs on your own computer. Every weekday morning it searches employer hiring systems, USAJOBS and the big job boards, rates each posting against your actual background, and drafts a tailored resume and application text when you find one worth pursuing. Version 0.1.0 is on GitHub now.

The problem I was trying to solve

I spent thirty years in the Army, mostly in the Signal Corps. I’ve run large organizations, managed real budgets, and led technical work at a scale most civilian hiring managers would recognize instantly if it were described in their language. It almost never is.

That’s the core problem. A military career is written in its own dialect. Titles like Deputy Commanding Officer, Chief of Staff or Director of Technology map loosely onto civilian roles, but the mapping is never obvious, and the software that screens resumes doesn’t do translation. An applicant tracking system looks for keywords. If the posting says “VP of IT Operations” and your resume says “Deputy Commanding Officer,” the machine doesn’t care that you ran a 5,000-person technology organization. It sees no match.

I hit that wall myself. Translating my own resume was harder than I expected, and doing it again for every application was worse. So was the tracking. I started with a Google Sheet to track everything, and it got cumbersome fast.

So I did what engineers do when a tool doesn’t exist. I built one.

What it actually does

The design came from my own frustrations, so the features are pretty practical.

It goes where the jobs are. Noble Search reads employer hiring systems directly, including Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, BambooHR and Eightfold. That matters because a lot of defense and aerospace employers run their hiring through systems like Workday, and the board listings don’t always catch everything that’s posted there. It also pulls federal jobs from USAJOBS and searches the major boards through an API that covers the Google for Jobs index, which reaches LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter. Duplicates get merged, so the same job posted in four places shows up once.

It rates fit in plain English. Each posting gets a High, Medium or Low rating with a short explanation written in civilian terms, plus the gaps. Something like “strong leadership match, but the role expects FedRAMP experience you haven’t listed.” That gap list is the most useful part for me. It tells me what to address in a cover letter, or whether to skip the job.

It drafts applications from your real record. You build a career inventory once: your roles, how many people you led, budgets, results, and the civilian title you’d use for each one. When you want to apply, it drafts a Word resume in your own layout plus the text blocks Workday-style forms ask for, like a summary, work history, screening answers and a cover letter.

It won’t make things up. This was non-negotiable. The drafts use only what’s in your inventory, every number is checked against it, and anything it can’t verify gets flagged “to verify” instead of quietly invented. An AI that pads your resume is a liability, and a fabricated claim on a federal application is a much bigger problem than a weak one.

It never applies for you. It doesn’t fill in forms, doesn’t submit anything, and doesn’t try to get around bot protection on hiring sites. You read the draft, you fix it, you submit it. I wanted a tool that saves the tedious hours, not one that sends applications in my name without me reading them.

There’s also a status tracker (Interested, Applied, Interviewing, Offer, Dismissed), a watchlist, CSV export, and optional morning alerts by email or phone push.

Why it runs on your computer

Early on I made a decision that shaped everything after: Noble Search runs on your machine, not on mine.

Your career inventory is about the most personal professional data you have. Assignment history, unit details, performance results, salary expectations. I didn’t want to hold that for anyone, and I don’t think a transitioning service member should have to hand it to a startup to get help with a resume.

So all the data stays in a folder on your computer: jobs, notes, profile, resumes and drafts. There’s no account and nothing reports back to me. The only things that leave your machine are what the work actually requires. Search terms go to the job sites (never your profile), and when you ask for a rating or a draft, the relevant profile text and job posting go to the AI provider.

Installing it means installing Docker, downloading the project, and running two commands. The README walks through every step for Mac, Windows and Linux, and you don’t need to write code. If you can follow a recipe, you can install it.

Why the public version is free

I went back and forth on this. I’ve built a few tools at this point, and the natural move is to host it, put a login page on it, and charge a small monthly fee. I seriously considered that.

Three things pushed me the other way.

The people who need it most have the least slack. Transition is expensive and stressful. Plenty of people are leaving the service with a family to move, a TAP class schedule to juggle, and no idea what their next paycheck looks like. Adding a subscription to that list felt wrong for something I’d already built for myself.

Hosting it would have broken the privacy design. The moment I run it as a service, I’m the one holding everyone’s career data. That’s a security responsibility I’d take seriously, and it’s exactly what I was trying to avoid. A version you run yourself keeps the data where it belongs.

I don’t want to be a job board. There are good transition programs and good job services already. Noble Search works alongside them the way a good spreadsheet or resume template does, making your own search faster without ever standing between you and an employer.

Free doesn’t mean zero cost to run, and I want to be straight about that. The AI ratings and drafts use Anthropic’s Claude API, which you pay for directly with your own key. Typical use runs about $2 to $10 a month for ratings, and roughly 5 to 15 cents per resume draft. The USAJOBS key is free, the job board API has a free tier that covers daily searches, and alerts are free. If you have a computer with a serious graphics card, you can run a local model through Ollama instead and pay nothing for AI at all, though it’s much slower.

Who it’s for, and who it isn’t

Noble Search works best for people who are comfortable spending an hour on setup and want a daily routine, not a one-time search. If you’re in your last year or two of service, on terminal leave, or a veteran who’s been sending applications into the void for months, that’s the target.

It’s especially useful if your experience is senior or unusual. The more your career looks unlike the civilian job titles you’re applying for, the more you gain from the translation and the gap analysis. A logistics NCO moving into supply chain management, an officer aiming at operations director roles, a cyber specialist trying to get past the “requires five years of private sector experience” screen: those are the cases where a keyword match fails you most.

It isn’t for everyone. If you’ve already got a civilian career going and a recruiter who understands your background, you probably don’t need it. If you want something that applies to hundreds of jobs on your behalf, this deliberately won’t do that, and honestly I think those tools do applicants more harm than good. And if the idea of installing Docker makes your stomach hurt, ask a technical friend to spend twenty minutes with you on it. Once it’s running, you won’t touch the setup again.

One more thing it isn’t: a substitute for a human network. The best jobs in defense still tend to come through someone who knows someone. Noble Search finds and prepares the opportunities. You still have to make the calls.

The license, in plain terms

Noble Search is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. That’s a deliberate choice, and it’s worth being precise: it’s not an open source license in the formal sense.

What it means in practice:

• Individuals can use it freely for their own job search.
• Charities, schools, veteran service organizations, public-safety organizations and government agencies can use it for noncommercial purposes.
• You can read every line of the code, which matters for a tool that handles your personal data.
• You can’t sell it, run it as a paid service, or use it commercially without written permission from CyberCloudAI.

If you run a transition program and want to use it with your cohort, that’s exactly the kind of use I hoped for. If you’re a company that wants to package it, talk to me first.

What’s next

This is version 0.1.0, which means it works and has rough edges. I run my own version of it every day, so I find a lot of the rough edges myself. Questions go to GitHub Discussions and bugs go to GitHub Issues. I read both.

If you’re within a year or two of getting out, or you’re a veteran still trying to get a civilian recruiter to understand what you did, give it a try. And if you know someone in that spot, send them the link. Word of mouth from one veteran to another is still the best distribution channel there is.

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Where to go next

• Get Noble Search: the product page has the download link, costs and setup steps.
• Transitioning into a defense contractor? See how ready your next employer probably is with the CMMC readiness quiz.
• Our CMMC guide for small contractors explains the compliance world a lot of veterans end up working in.
• Running a small defense business yourself? Our CMMC packets are built for shops your size.