Resume example · For job seekers
Software Engineer Resume Example
A software engineer resume example and template, with summaries by level, the skills to list, project and impact bullets, and tips for developer resumes.
The short answer
A strong Software Engineer resume opens with a short summary, groups the skills employers will test, and backs each role with bullets that show what changed because of your work. Below is a full example, summary wording for graduate or bootcamp, career changer, mid level and senior or staff candidates, and how to get through applicant tracking systems.
- One page for under about five years of experience; two pages for senior engineers with relevant depth.
- A plain single-column layout reads best; engineers skim quickly and dislike visual clutter.
- Start bullets with a verb and include the technology and the outcome in the same line.
A software engineer resume has to show two things fast: what you build with, and what happened when you built it. Hiring managers and engineers skim for languages and frameworks that match the job, the scale and kind of systems you have worked on, and evidence that your code shipped and mattered. This guide covers each section of a software engineer or software developer resume, with a full example, summaries for every level, bullet wording that shows impact, and the formatting choices that keep a programmer resume readable for people and parsing software alike.
Example Software Engineer resume
Daniel Okafor
Software Engineer
London, UKdaniel.okafor@example.comgithub.com/example-daniel
Summary
Software engineer with five years building back-end services in Go and Python on AWS. Owns services from design to on-call, and focuses on clear APIs, good tests and observability.
Skills
- Languages
- Go, Python, TypeScript, SQL
- Platforms and tools
- AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions
- Data
- PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka
Experience
Software Engineer · Northwind Payments, London
2023 – present
- Built a notifications service in Go that gave product teams one API for email, SMS and push, replacing three separate scripts.
- Led the move of billing out of the monolith into its own service with no customer-facing downtime.
- Added tracing and service dashboards that shortened incident investigation for the on-call rota.
- Mentored two junior engineers through design reviews and their first on-call shifts.
Junior Software Engineer · Contoso Retail Tech, Reading
2021 – 2023
- Built REST endpoints in Python for the stock and orders API used by store staff.
- Wrote integration tests for the checkout flow and added them to the CI pipeline.
- Improved slow search queries with indexing and caching.
Education
BSc Computer Science · Contoso University
2018 – 2021
Final-year project: a peer-to-peer file sync tool in Go.
Projects
- Open-source contributor to a command-line tool for managing environment variables (documentation and tests).
Summary examples
Three or four lines at the top of the page. Pick the one closest to your situation and rewrite it with your own tools and work.
Graduate or bootcamp
Career changer
Mid level
Senior or staff
Skills to list
Hard skills
Soft skills
List only what you could be tested on. Soft skills carry more weight shown in a bullet than named in a list.
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Experience bullet points
Building features and services
- Designed and built a notifications service in Go that replaced three ad hoc email scripts, giving product teams one API for email, SMS and push.
- Shipped a self-serve refunds flow in React and Node.js, taking the most common support request off the support team’s queue.
- Rewrote the search endpoint to use database indexes and caching, bringing page load times down noticeably on the busiest pages.
Reliability and performance
- Added tracing and dashboards to the checkout services, so on-call engineers could find the failing dependency within minutes instead of digging through logs.
- Led the migration of a monolith’s billing module to its own service with no customer-facing downtime.
- Wrote load tests ahead of a seasonal sale and fixed the two bottlenecks they exposed before the traffic arrived.
Engineering practice and leadership
- Introduced a pull request template and test coverage checks that cut the number of bugs reaching production.
- Mentored two junior engineers through their first on-call rotations and design reviews.
- Wrote the design document for a new data model and ran the review with three teams before any code was written.
What to include
Header
Name, city and country, email, and links to GitHub, a portfolio or LinkedIn. Make sure any linked repositories are public, tidy and show your own work.
Summary
Two to four lines with your level, main languages, the kind of systems you build and the role you want. Skip it if you are a graduate and your projects say more.
Technical skills
Group by languages, frameworks, data, cloud and tools. List only what you could discuss in a technical interview, and put the advert’s stack first.
Experience
Reverse chronological. Three to six bullets per role naming what you built, the technologies and the result for users or the business.
Projects
Essential for graduates, bootcamp candidates and career changers. Name the problem, the stack and what the project does, and link the code or a live demo.
Education and certifications
Degree or bootcamp with dates. Cloud certifications can help for platform-heavy roles; they do not replace evidence of shipped work.
Formatting
- One page for under about five years of experience; two pages for senior engineers with relevant depth.
- A plain single-column layout reads best; engineers skim quickly and dislike visual clutter.
- Start bullets with a verb and include the technology and the outcome in the same line.
- Use figures from your own work only when you can explain how you measured them.
- Save as PDF and check that links in the file are clickable.
Getting past applicant tracking systems
- 1Write technology names the way the advert does, for example “JavaScript” and “TypeScript” rather than “JS/TS”.
- 2Include both the specific framework and the language, such as “React (TypeScript)”.
- 3Keep skills as plain text rather than logos, icons or skill bars.
- 4Use standard headings: Experience, Projects, Skills, Education.
- 5Match the job title where it is accurate: “Software Engineer” and “Software Developer” are often used for the same work.
Common mistakes
- A long list of every language you have touched, with no sign of what you built.
- Bullets that describe tickets (“fixed bugs”) rather than outcomes.
- Linking a GitHub profile full of forks and unfinished tutorials.
- Hiding the stack the advert asks for at the bottom of the page.
- Leaving out scale and context, such as who used the system and why it mattered.
Common questions
How long should a software engineer resume be?
One page for most engineers with under about five years of experience. Senior and staff engineers can use two pages if the second page holds relevant design and leadership work.
Is a software developer resume different from a software engineer resume?
Very little. Employers use both titles for similar work, so write for the advert: use its title and stack, and lead with the projects most like the role.
Should I include personal projects?
Yes, if you are early in your career or changing careers, or if a project shows a skill your jobs do not. One finished project with clear documentation beats several half-built ones.
Do I need a GitHub link?
It helps when your public code is tidy and your own. If most of your work is private, a short project section that explains what you built is enough.
What should a programmer put in the skills section?
Languages, frameworks, databases, cloud platforms and tools, grouped, with the ones named in the advert first. Leave out anything you could not discuss in an interview.
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