Software Engineer resume example

What to put in the summary

Two or three lines: the kind of systems you build, how long you have done it, and one thing you are known for, such as keeping latency down or taking over messy services. Leave out “passionate about technology”; every applicant says it and it tells the reader nothing.

Backend engineer with six years building payment and notification services in Go and PostgreSQL. I like inheriting the service nobody wants to touch and leaving it with tests, dashboards and a runbook. Most recently owned the ledger service at a 40-person fintech.

Sample bullets with numbers

Each bullet names the thing you changed, what it did to a number someone cared about, and roughly how long it took. If you cannot measure it, say what stopped happening.

• Rebuilt the invoice-export job as a streaming worker, cutting p95 runtime from 38 minutes to 6 and removing the nightly on-call page.
• Introduced contract tests between the billing and ledger services; failed deploys caused by schema drift fell from about two a month to none in a year.
• Led the move from a single Postgres instance to a primary with two read replicas, with zero downtime and a rollback plan that was never needed.
• Mentored three engineers through their first production launches; two now own services of their own.
• Wrote the retry and idempotency layer for outbound webhooks, so 99.97% of customer events were delivered exactly once over the following quarter.
• Replaced a hand-run deploy checklist with a pipeline, shortening release time from half a day to 20 minutes.

These numbers are invented to show the shape of a good bullet. Use your own, and leave a number out rather than guess.

Key skills to list

• Go
• Python
• TypeScript
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Kafka
• AWS
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• gRPC
• Observability (Prometheus, Grafana)

Group by what you would be comfortable being interviewed on. A long list of tools you used once invites questions you do not want.

Common mistakes

1. 1Listing every language you have ever written. Recruiters read a 20-item list as “none deeply”.
2. 2Describing duties (“responsible for the API”) instead of results (“cut API errors by 60%”).
3. 3Linking a GitHub profile full of empty forks. Pin two or three repositories you would happily walk through.
4. 4Burying the current job under a long education or projects section when you have five or more years of experience.

A layout that suits this resume

Modern keeps one column and a thin accent rule, so a parser reads it top to bottom while a reviewer still finds the projects and stack quickly. See the Quill template, or compare all 22 layouts.