JOBL Format Specification

File Extension

.jobl

Top-Level Keys

• person (required): Personal information table
• skills (optional): Skills organized by category
• experience (optional): Array of work experience
• projects (optional): Array of projects
• education (optional): Array of education entries

Unknown top-level keys are errors.

Person Section

Required

• name: Full name

Optional

• headline: Professional headline
• location: Current location
• email: Contact email
• website: Personal website URL
• phone: Contact phone
• summary: Professional summary

Unknown fields in the person section are errors.

Skills Section

A table mapping category names to arrays of skill strings.

Example:

[skills]
languages = ["Rust", "Python", "JavaScript"]
devops = ["Docker", "Kubernetes"]

Experience Items

Each item in the experience array.

Required

• title: Job title
• company: Company name

Optional

• location: Job location
• start: Start date (recommend 'YYYY-MM' format)
• end: End date or 'present'
• summary: Role summary
• technologies: Array of technologies used
• highlights: Array of achievement highlights

Unknown fields in experience items are errors.

Project Items

Each item in the projects array.

Required

• name: Project name

Optional

• url: Project URL
• summary: Project description
• role: Your role
• start: Start date
• end: End date
• technologies: Array of technologies

Unknown fields in project items are errors.

Education Items

Each item in the education array.

Required

• institution: School or institution name
• degree: Degree or certification

Optional

• location: Institution location
• start: Start date
• end: End date
• details: Array of additional details

Unknown fields in education items are errors.

Validation

The parser performs strict validation:

• Unknown top-level keys are errors
• Unknown fields in sections are errors
• Type mismatches are errors
• Multiple errors are collected and reported together

Errors include path context for debugging:

• person.name: Missing required field
• experience[0].unknown: Unknown field in first experience item
• skills.languages: Invalid type

Versioning

JOBL does not require a version field in documents. The library version determines which specification features are supported.

Example

[person]
name = "Jane Developer"
email = "jane@example.com"
headline = "Senior Software Engineer"
location = "San Francisco, CA"
website = "https://jane.dev"
summary = "Experienced engineer specializing in distributed systems"

[skills]
languages = ["Rust", "Python", "Go", "JavaScript"]
frameworks = ["Tokio", "Django", "React"]
tools = ["Docker", "Kubernetes", "PostgreSQL"]

[[experience]]
title = "Senior Software Engineer"
company = "Tech Corp"
location = "San Francisco, CA"
start = "2020-01"
end = "present"
summary = "Lead engineer for distributed data platform"
technologies = ["Rust", "Kubernetes", "PostgreSQL"]
highlights = [
  "Designed and built distributed event processing system handling 1M+ events/sec",
  "Led team of 5 engineers through migration to microservices architecture",
  "Reduced infrastructure costs by 40% through optimization"
]

[[experience]]
title = "Software Engineer"
company = "Startup Inc"
location = "Remote"
start = "2018-06"
end = "2019-12"
summary = "Full-stack engineer on core product team"
technologies = ["Python", "Django", "React", "PostgreSQL"]
highlights = [
  "Built REST API serving 10k+ requests/minute",
  "Implemented real-time collaboration features"
]

[[projects]]
name = "open-source-project"
url = "https://github.com/jane/project"
summary = "High-performance data processing library"
role = "Creator and maintainer"
technologies = ["Rust", "SIMD"]

[[education]]
institution = "University of California"
degree = "BS Computer Science"
location = "Berkeley, CA"
start = "2014"
end = "2018"
details = ["GPA: 3.8", "Dean's List"]