Junior software engineer resume example

What recruiters look for

• Evidence you shipped: features in production with users, not only coursework. Say who used it and what changed.
• A coherent stack: five to eight technologies you used together beat twenty you have heard of.
• Code quality habits: tests, code review, documentation and on-call show you will not need hand-holding forever.
• Learning speed: what you picked up in your first months and how quickly you became useful.
• Projects with real users if your experience is thin: a deployed app with sign-ups beats a tutorial clone.

Writing the summary

Two sentences: your level and stack, then what kind of work you do well. Avoid “passionate” and “eager to learn”; everyone says it. If you are still a student or between jobs, say what role you want.

Bullet points that work

Strong lines for this role, beyond the ones in the example. Borrow the shape and put in your own numbers.

• Reduced the build time of the web app from 9 to 4 minutes by caching dependencies in CI, saving the team about 30 developer-hours a month.
• Implemented pagination for the orders API, cutting response size for large merchants from 12 MB to 200 KB.
• Wrote a migration script that moved 1.4 million user records to a new schema with zero downtime.
• Built an internal Slack bot in Node.js that answers deploy-status questions, now used 300 times a week.
• Closed 25 accessibility issues in the checkout flow, bringing it to WCAG 2.2 AA for the first time.
• Added structured logging to three services, which cut the average time to find the cause of an incident from 50 to 20 minutes.
• Paired with a senior engineer to redesign the notification queue, then owned its rollout to 100% of traffic.
• Contributed four merged pull requests to an open-source date library with 5,000 GitHub stars.
• Answered 120 developer questions on our internal forum, one of the top three contributors in my first year.

Skills to list

Certifications and licenses worth listing

• None required: for software engineering, shipped work and projects count far more than certificates.
• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner or Developer Associate: a small plus for roles that are heavy on AWS.
• Language or framework certificates from online courses: list them only if you have little else; projects say more.

Length and format

One page, no exceptions at this level. Order: summary, experience (internships count), projects if they are strong, education with relevant courses, skills. Once you have a year of full-time work, education moves below experience and GPA can go if it is under 3.5.

Common mistakes

• Listing every language from university. Keep the ones you would happily be interviewed on.
• Describing coursework as if it were a job. Put class projects in Projects, with what you built and what it did.
• Bullets that say what the team did. Recruiters want your part: “I built”, “I added”, “I fixed”.
• A GitHub link to a profile with no recent or finished work.
• Self-rated skill bars (“Python 4 of 5”). They mean nothing to a reader; evidence in bullets does.