I write and post most of Terravek's engineering vacancies. Here is what to read in a job advertisement, using our own as the example.
Salary range published or not. We publish ours, in the currency and gross terms of the country. A company that will not publish a range before an interview is asking you to invest hours before knowing whether the conversation is worth having. There is no good reason for this that survives scrutiny.
The requirements list length. A list of twenty required technologies means either that the role is unscoped or that nobody senior wrote it. Ours run to four or five, because that is genuinely what we cannot train.
Whether the manager is named. Ours are. If a company will not tell you who you would report to, they are treating the reporting line as a detail, and it is the single largest determinant of whether you enjoy a job.
What the advertisement says about the bad parts. Our SRE posting says there is a 1-in-8 on-call rotation and that it is compensated. An advertisement that mentions no downside is describing a job that does not exist.
Applications go to careers@terravek.com or through the posting. We do not accept unsolicited agency CVs and we will not pay a fee for one.