Our story

Two students who couldn't stop thinking about it.

RoleSift is built by two people who've lived the graduate job hunt — and decided to fix what was broken about it.

Sebastian & Irfan

Who we are

It started with a frustration — and a conversation between two people who'd both felt it.

We're Sebastian and Irfan, co-founders, Durham flatmates, and teammates on the volleyball court long before we were ever partners in a business. We met during our masters and quickly realised we had more in common than a shared flat — we were both watching the same thing unfold around us. Bright, capable people spending months applying for jobs they weren't sure about, getting rejected without understanding why, or landing roles that turned out to be nothing like what they'd signed up for.

The graduate job market is one of the most high-stakes decisions a young person makes, and yet it's treated like a numbers game. Apply to everything. Hope something sticks. Deal with the consequences later. We've both been through it. We've watched friends go through it. And we kept asking the same question: why is there nothing that actually helps you decide whether a job is worth your time before you spend hours on an application?

That question became RoleSift.

We're not a team of investors who spotted a gap in a market report. We're two people who built something because we needed it, our friends needed it, and frankly, every student staring down their final year deserves better than a spreadsheet and a prayer. RoleSift is the tool we wish had existed — and we're building it with the people who need it most at the centre of every decision we make.

The founders

Built by two people who lived the problem first.

Sebastian

CEO & Co-Founder

I built a tool to fix a broken system I hated watching my friends suffer through, only to realize the co-founder I needed to make it real was sitting right across our kitchen table.

During my MSc in Management at Durham, I was sitting in a lecture on optimizing AI for productivity when everything suddenly clicked.

For years, I'd watched my friends go through the absolute meat grinder of the graduate application cycle. I saw the exhausted, late-night panic of tailoring CVs, the crushing radio silence of rejections, and the quiet dread of people accepting offers only to realize the start date clashed with graduation. Worse, I watched people land jobs that looked incredible on paper, only to realize on day one that the role was nothing like the description. It felt insane to me that we were making some of the biggest commitments of our early careers based on a vague job listing, a rushed 30-minute interview, and a prayer.

RoleSift wasn't born out of a grand business plan; it started as a messy side project. I just wanted to use what I was learning to make applying for a job feel less like Russian roulette.

But then I started showing it to the people around me — the friends losing sleep over deadlines, the coursemates staring blankly at offer letters they weren't sure they should sign. Every single person I talked to had the exact same look of exhaustion. The frustration wasn't just common; it was universal. There was a massive, painful gap in the process, and nobody was fixing it.

That's the moment the imposter syndrome cleared, and I realized this couldn't just be a folder on my laptop anymore. It had to be real.

But I also knew I couldn't carry it alone. I needed someone to challenge me, pull me out of my own head, and bring the skills I completely lacked. As it turned out, I didn't have to look far at all. I found all of that in Irfan — who I happened to be sharing a flat with. What started as casual venting over morning coffees in our kitchen quickly turned into late-night mapping sessions at the dining table, realizing we were both looking at the exact same problem from different angles.

Irfan

CFO & Co-Founder

I was quietly trying to solve the exact same job-hunt misery on my own, until a pitch from my flatmate made me realize our separate ideas belonged in the same machine.

Doing my MSc in Finance at Durham, I was stuck in that exact same grind. The endless, repetitive applications, the exhausting waiting games, and that nagging feeling that you're flying completely blind until you're already too deep in the interview process to back out. I'd felt the sting of those automated rejections that offer zero closure, and I'd watched friends accept jobs for all the wrong reasons — purely because they were burned out, a deadline was staring them down, or it just seemed "fine enough." It drove me crazy that a decision this massive was being treated like a roll of the dice.

I'd actually started quietly sketching out my own project to try and fix it. Seb and I had already been bouncing ideas back and forth, and his perspective was definitely shaping how I looked at the problem. But when he finally sat me down, pitched RoleSift properly, and asked what I honestly thought, I didn't just give him feedback — I ended up laying out a whole blueprint.

Instead of getting defensive, Seb just listened. He pushed back, asked the right questions, and then, right there, asked me to come on board.

It wasn't even a hard decision. I didn't just understand the problem; I was actively living it. Plus, taking a massive risk feels a lot less terrifying when you're doing it with someone you already trust implicitly — someone you've already had a hundred arguments with over terrible flat coffee and exhausting volleyball training sessions.

Folding my own project into RoleSift instantly made the whole thing sharper. That's when it clicked for both of us: we weren't just two guys working side-by-side in the same flat anymore. We were building something neither of us ever could have pulled off alone.

Irfan