Software Engineer Resume Example
A software engineer's resume is read twice: once by a keyword filter looking for the stack in the job description, and once by an engineer scanning for whether you have built anything hard. It has to survive both, and those two readers want different things.
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What a software engineer resume has to prove
The filter wants your languages, frameworks and cloud platform named explicitly. The engineer wants scale, ownership and outcomes — what broke, what you changed, and what got measurably better. Bullets that stop at "developed features using React" fail the second reader completely.
Professional summary example
Four lines at the top of the page. Lead with the shape of your experience, then one result that proves it.
Backend engineer with 5 years building payment and identity services on AWS. Took a checkout API from 400ms p99 to 90ms under 3x traffic growth, and led the migration of a 12-service monolith to event-driven workers. Comfortable owning a service end to end, from schema design through on-call.
Achievement bullet points
Written the way this role is measured. Swap the numbers for yours — keep the shape.
- Cut checkout API p99 latency from 400ms to 90ms by replacing synchronous fraud checks with a queued worker, absorbing 3x traffic growth with no added instances
- Migrated 12 services off a shared Postgres instance to per-service databases, eliminating the lock contention behind 60% of production incidents that quarter
- Built and shipped the idempotency layer for the payments API, reducing duplicate-charge support tickets from ~40/month to 2
- Introduced contract tests between the mobile client and 6 backend services, catching 23 breaking changes before release over 8 months
- Mentored 3 junior engineers through their first on-call rotations; all 3 were shipping independently within a quarter
Skills to list
Roughly in order of how often they appear in postings for this role.
- Python
- TypeScript
- Go
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS)
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
- REST and gRPC APIs
- Distributed systems
- Observability (Datadog, OpenTelemetry)
ATS keywords
Include the ones that are genuinely true of you — a keyword you cannot discuss in an interview costs more than it wins.
- software engineer
- backend development
- microservices
- API design
- cloud infrastructure
- unit testing
- code review
- agile
- system design
- SQL
Mistakes that sink software engineer resumes
- Listing every technology you have ever opened. A filter matches the job description, and a 40-item stack list reads as unfamiliarity with all of it.
- Describing team output as your own. "We migrated…" tells the reader nothing about what you did; name your piece.
- Leaving out scale. "Built a data pipeline" and "built a pipeline processing 200GB/day" are different jobs.
- Burying side projects above paid work. Real production experience outranks a personal repo, however good the repo is.
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Put this into your own resume
Start from a template, paste in your history, and let the AI rewrite your bullets into the shape above. Free to build and preview.