Software engineer resume example

What recruiters look for

• Ownership: features or services you designed and ran in production, not only tickets you closed.
• Scale and reliability: traffic, data volume, latency, availability. Numbers tell a reader what kind of system you worked on.
• Business impact: conversion, revenue, cost, support load. Tie at least two bullets to something the business measures.
• Technical judgment: a migration, a trade-off, a design document. It signals you are on the way to senior.
• Helping others: mentoring, reviews, templates. Mid-level engineers who lift the team are promoted first.

Writing the summary

Name your specialty (backend, full-stack, mobile), years of experience and the domain. Add one line on how you work. If you are switching domains, say what transfers.

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 monthly AWS spend by $18,000 by right-sizing 40 services and moving cold data to S3 Glacier.
• Built a feature-flag system used by 12 teams, making it possible to ship daily instead of every two weeks.
• Rewrote the search indexer in Go, cutting full reindex time from 7 hours to 40 minutes.
• Designed the rate limiter that protected the public API during a 15x traffic spike on launch day with no downtime.
• Led incident response for a payments outage, wrote the postmortem, and shipped the three fixes that prevented a repeat.
• Introduced database migrations with automatic rollback, ending a class of failed deploys that happened about twice a month.
• Split a 200,000-line monolith’s billing module into a separate service over two quarters with no customer-visible change.
• Interviewed 30 candidates and helped design the team’s take-home exercise, which halved interview time per hire.
• Shipped an accessible redesign of account settings, raising its task completion rate in usability tests from 61% to 89%.
• Added end-to-end tracing with OpenTelemetry across 8 services, cutting the time to find slow requests from hours to minutes.

Skills to list

Certifications and licenses worth listing

• AWS Certified Developer or Solutions Architect Associate: worth listing for cloud-heavy roles.
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD): useful for platform-leaning backend roles.
• No certification is expected for most product engineering roles; spend the space on results.

Length and format

One page is right for up to about eight years of experience. Give your current job four or five bullets and the previous one three. Education goes below experience, with no GPA or coursework.

Common mistakes

• Bullets that start with “Worked on” or “Responsible for”. Lead with what you designed, built, cut or fixed.
• No numbers at all. Even rough figures (“about 30 services”, “roughly 2 million requests a day”) help a reader place you.
• A wall of acronyms in the skills section. Group them and keep only what you would defend in an interview.
• Listing every job since university with equal detail. Older roles get one or two lines.
• Hiding the impact of good engineering. “Raised test coverage” matters more when you add what it prevented.