Create an API key

Updated September 8, 2026

An API key is what your careers site, or your ATS, presents to reach your roles. It is created in Orbit, shown once, and can be revoked at any moment. This page is the whole lifecycle: create, store, rotate, revoke.

Create the key

1. In Orbit, open Settings → API keys.
2. Choose New key.
3. Give it a label that says where it will live, such as careers site — production. Keys are told apart by label and by their last four characters, so a label written for the future you is worth the ten seconds.
4. Pick the scope. There are three, and the right one is the narrowest that does the job — a key with more reach than its work is a key that does more damage when it leaks.
   • Read jobs only — your open roles and their details. What a careers site needs.
   • Read and manage jobs — also creates, edits, publishes and closes roles. Publishing spends credits, so this belongs in a system you run, not in a page’s configuration.
   • Screening — the candidate screening endpoints, which read candidate data.
5. Choose Create.

The one-time reveal

The full key is shown once. Copy it, put it where your site’s configuration lives, and only then close the dialog.

It cannot be shown again, and that is not a permission we could grant later: Wipperoz stores a hash of the key, never the key itself. The list in Settings shows the label, the last four characters, who created it and when it was last used. It never shows the value.

Store it

Treat it like any other secret. The convention in these docs is an environment variable:

export ORBIT_API_KEY="…the key you copied…"

Rotate without downtime

Nothing limits an account to one key, and overlapping keys are how a rotation happens without your careers page going dark. The order matters:

1. Create the replacement key.
2. Update your site to use it, and confirm it is reading roles.
3. Revoke the old key.

Revoking first and creating second takes your careers page down for however long the swap takes.

Revoke

Revocation is immediate and cannot be undone. A request made with a revoked key is refused within one request; there is no cache to wait out. Before revoking, check last used in the list: a key used minutes ago is a key something is relying on right now, and the safe move is to rotate as above rather than revoke outright.

A key that has never been used usually means an integration that was started and abandoned, not one sitting idle. It is the safest key to revoke.

Next

Make your first request with the key on the next page.