Watchtower MCP server

Watchtower

Tech job monitoring for AI agents. Say what you are looking for once and get only the new postings that match, from the job boards of tech companies and startups, as structured JSON.

Agents are bad at waiting for a job to be posted. A session lasts minutes, careers pages are heavy to re-read, and "has anyone posted an iOS role in Austin yet?" turns into re-running the same search every day. With Watchtower the agent creates a watch once, in plain language:

{ "query": "iOS jobs in Austin making at least 150k a year with a maximum of 6 years of experience" }

Watchtower checks the job boards of tech companies and startups on a schedule and remembers which jobs were open. getchanges then returns only the new postings that match, and a webhook can wake the agent when one arrives. An agent can also watch one company's board by URL and get JOBADDED, JOBREMOVED and JOBUPDATED events.

• No URL needed. A watch created from a query covers every board Watchtower monitors: a built-in directory of tech company and startup boards plus every board anyone has watched by URL.
• Pay and experience. Jobs carry salary and experienceyears when the posting states them, and watches filter on minsalary and maxexperienceyears.
• Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, SmartRecruiters, Recruitee, Workday and iCIMS are read through each platform's own endpoints: no bot walls. Any other careers page works if it publishes schema.org JobPosting markup.
• Filters on the watch, so getchanges only returns what matters: keywords, allkeywords, excludekeywords, locations, seniority, remoteonly, minsalary and maxexperience_years. Every job carries derived remote and seniority fields.
• Many companies in one call: pass urls instead of url.
• MCP (Streamable HTTP) and REST, backed by the same service layer.
• Free and anonymous: a client gets a token and up to 50 watches (a search across all boards is one watch).
• TypeScript, Node.js 22, Fastify 5, PostgreSQL, the official MCP TypeScript SDK. No LLM or third-party API keys required.

Use the hosted service

Watchtower runs at watchtower.lat, free, with no sign-up. MCP endpoint: https://watchtower.lat/mcp.

• Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http watchtower https://watchtower.lat/mcp, or install the plugin, which adds a skill that tells Claude when to use it:

/plugin marketplace add connorlagana/watchtower
  /plugin install watchtower@watchtower

• Claude.ai / Claude Desktop: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector → https://watchtower.lat/mcp.
• Cursor, VS Code: one-click buttons at watchtower.lat/#install.
• Anything else: { "mcpServers": { "watchtower": { "type": "http", "url": "https://watchtower.lat/mcp" } } }.

Listed in the MCP Registry as lat.watchtower/watchtower (server.json).

Quick start

cp .env.example .env
docker compose up --build          # app on http://localhost:3000, Postgres alongside
docker compose --profile demo run --rm demo   # the end-to-end demo below

Without Docker (Node 22 and a running Postgres):

npm install
export DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/watchtower
npm run migrate
npm run dev                         # or: npm run build && npm start

Demo

npm run demo (with DATABASE_URL set) runs the core loop end to end against a local fixture careers page:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.