[Full Name]: Software Engineer Resume

Resume template for software engineers at any level, from new graduate to staff. Based on common recruiting practice: a scannable header, a short summary, grouped skills, and experience written as impact bullets (action + result with numbers). Replace every [bracketed] value and every line marked Example, then delete the sections that do not apply and the tailoring notes at the end before you send it.

Header

[Full Name] [Senior Software Engineer, Backend and Distributed Systems]

[City, Country] (open to [remote / relocation]) · [[email protected]] · [+00 000 000 000] [github.com/username] · [linkedin.com/in/username] · [yourdomain.dev]

Summary

[Software engineer with N years building [type of systems] in [languages]. Strongest in [area]. Recently [headline achievement with a number]. Looking for [scope of next role].]

Example: Backend engineer with 8 years building high-traffic payment and ledger services in Go and Java. Strongest in distributed data consistency and incident-free migrations. Recently led the move of 1.2 billion ledger rows to a sharded PostgreSQL cluster with zero downtime. Looking for a senior or staff role owning core platform services.

Skills

Experience

[Job title] · [Company] · [City or Remote]

[Mon YYYY] to [Present] · [One line of context: product, scale, team size, stack.]

• [Action verb] [what you built or changed] using [technology or method], [result with a number].
• [Action verb] [what you built or changed] using [technology or method], [result with a number].
• [Led / mentored / owned] [people or process outcome].

Example: Senior Software Engineer · Northwind Payments · Remote Mar 2022 to Present · Ledger and payouts platform, 40 million transactions per day, team of 7, Go and PostgreSQL on AWS.

• Example: Designed and led the migration of the ledger to a sharded PostgreSQL cluster (16 shards), cutting p99 write latency from 180 ms to 35 ms with zero customer-visible downtime.
• Example: Built an idempotency layer for the payouts API that eliminated duplicate transfers (from 14 per month to 0) and closed a long-standing audit finding.
• Example: Reduced monthly AWS spend for the team by 31% (USD 22,000) by right-sizing RDS instances and moving batch jobs to Spot.
• Example: Introduced design-doc reviews and an on-call runbook; mean time to recovery fell from 74 to 21 minutes over two quarters.
• Example: Mentored three engineers, two of whom were promoted within 18 months.

[Job title] · [Company] · [City]

[Mon YYYY] to [Mon YYYY] · [Context line.]

• [Action + how + result.]
• [Action + how + result.]
• [Action + how + result.]

Example: Software Engineer · Bluebird Logistics · Berlin Jul 2018 to Feb 2022 · Route-planning SaaS for 900 fleet operators, Java and Kafka.

• Example: Rewrote the route-optimisation worker as a streaming service on Kafka, raising throughput from 2,000 to 15,000 jobs per minute.
• Example: Added contract tests between 11 services, reducing integration-related production incidents by 60% year over year.

Earlier experience

[Job title, Company, YYYY to YYYY; Job title, Company, YYYY to YYYY.]

Projects

Open source

• [Role or contribution] to [project], [what changed and why it mattered] ([link to PR]).
• Example: Contributor to pgx (PostgreSQL driver for Go): added support for pipeline mode, reducing round trips for batched queries by up to 70% in benchmarks (PR #1234).
• Example: Maintainer of [project] since 2023: triage, releases (v2.0 to v2.6) and a contributor guide that doubled first-time contributions.

Education

[Degree, Major] · [University] · [YYYY] [Optional: honours, thesis title, relevant coursework.]

Example: BSc Computer Science · University of Leeds · 2018. Thesis: "Consistency trade-offs in geo-replicated key-value stores".

Certifications

Additional (optional)

• Languages: [English (fluent), Vietnamese (native)]
• Talks: [Title, Conference, YYYY]
• Awards: [Award, Issuer, YYYY]

Tailoring and length notes

Use this checklist each time you adapt the master copy to a job posting.

Tailoring

1. Read the job description twice and highlight the five to eight skills or outcomes it repeats. Make sure each one appears, in the same wording, in your summary, skills or bullets, provided it is true.
2. Reorder bullets inside each role so the most relevant one comes first. Recruiters often read only the first two bullets.
3. Replace generic bullets with ones that match the company's scale and domain. A start-up values breadth and speed; a large company values scale, reliability and cross-team influence.
4. Adjust the title line to the role you want, as long as it honestly describes your work.
5. Remove technologies the target team does not use unless they show transferable depth.

Length

Final checks

• Every bullet starts with a verb and most contain a number.
• No spelling errors; company names and technologies use correct capitalisation (PostgreSQL, JavaScript, GitHub).
• Dates are consistent (Mon YYYY) and gaps are explainable.
• The PDF file name is Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf.
• Links open, and the GitHub profile shows pinned repositories that support the resume.

Standard and licence note

Based on common industry practice for software engineering resumes and recruiter screening. Original text written for this collection; example companies, figures and projects are fictional. Template licence: MIT.