0016 — silver is the retention layer; gold is live-only¶

Status: accepted

Where do postings that vanish from a board go? The pipeline never hard-deletes one: the raw landing is append-only, and silver_jobs keeps one row per job_key carrying first_seen_at, last_seen_at, and is_active. A taken-down posting simply flips to is_active = false (its last_seen_at falls behind its board's latest ingest) and stays in silver.

Decision. silver_jobs is the system of record for all postings, live and closed. Gold (fct_job_postings) deliberately filters to is_active — it is the live delivery view, and a closed posting must not surface as an apply link. Anyone who needs closed postings (analytics, "was this filled?", not re-surfacing them) queries silver directly, where is_active / last_seen_at make the state explicit.

No separate archive mart is built in V1: it would have no consumer yet (the deliverable is live links) and this repo avoids dead code. The hard retention floor is raw's ingestion-time partition expiry (bq_raw_partition_expiry_days, 400 days — shared/storage.py), after which a long-closed posting's raw rows age out and it leaves silver on the next rebuild. If a browsable archive of closed postings is wanted later, add a thin gold view over silver_jobs where not is_active then.