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Software Engineer Resume Example

Engineering resumes fail for an unusual reason: they describe the system instead of the engineer. A recruiter screening 200 applications cannot tell whether you designed the payment service or fixed a typo in it. The fix is to lead every bullet with your decision and its measurable consequence, then name the stack.

Software Engineer resume sample

Priya Raman

Senior Software Engineer

Austin, TX

Summary

Backend-leaning full-stack engineer with 7 years building payment and identity systems at scale. Led two zero-downtime migrations serving 2M+ users.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer · Northwind Payments2021 — Present
  • Cut p99 checkout latency from 840ms to 210ms via batched loaders and a Redis read-through cache, unblocking launch in three markets.
  • Led extraction of billing and notifications from a 400k-line monolith into two Go services; zero-downtime cutover for 2M users.
  • Mentored 4 engineers to mid-level; introduced design-doc reviews now used across a 60-person org.
Software Engineer · Larkfield Systems2018 — 2021
  • Shipped self-serve onboarding in React/TypeScript, cutting time-to-first-value from 4 days to 90 minutes.
  • Drove flaky-test rate from 12% to under 1%, reducing mean PR merge time from 2 days to 4 hours.

Skills

Go · TypeScript · Python · React · PostgreSQL · Redis · AWS · Kubernetes · Terraform · gRPC · CI/CD · System design

Education

B.S. Computer Science — University of Texas at Austin, 2018

A composite example. Figures are illustrative — use your own.

What recruiters scan for on a software engineer resume

  • Stack match in the first third of the page — the languages and frameworks in the job description, not every technology you have ever touched
  • Scale signals: requests per second, data volume, user counts, team size. These separate a hobby project from production work
  • Ownership verbs. "Designed", "led the migration of", "owned" read very differently from "worked on" and "helped with"
  • Evidence of shipping: a link to GitHub or a live product, and bullets that end in an outcome rather than a technology
  • Seniority calibration — whether your scope matches the level they are hiring for, which they infer from blast radius, not years

ATS keywords for software engineer roles

Terms that genuinely appear in software engineer job descriptions. Use the ones that are true of you — keyword stuffing is obvious to a human reader and does not help the score.

distributed systemsREST APImicroservicesCI/CDunit testingcode reviewAgile / ScrumDockerKubernetesAWSPostgreSQLsystem designperformance optimizationGit

Weak vs strong bullets for a software engineer

Worked on the backend team to improve API performance.

Cut p99 latency on the checkout API from 840ms to 210ms by replacing N+1 queries with a batched loader and adding a Redis read-through cache — unblocking a launch in three new markets.

Names the specific endpoint, the actual technique, a real before/after number, and the business consequence. "Improve performance" could mean anything; this proves you diagnosed and fixed a concrete problem.

Responsible for migrating our monolith to microservices.

Led the extraction of billing and notifications from a 400k-line Rails monolith into two Go services, running both paths in parallel for six weeks to reach zero-downtime cutover for 2M users.

"Responsible for" hides whether you finished. The rewrite shows scope (400k lines, 2M users), the risk-management approach, and the outcome — which is what a hiring manager is actually assessing.

Used React and TypeScript to build new features.

Shipped the self-serve onboarding flow in React and TypeScript, reducing time-to-first-value from 4 days to 90 minutes and lifting trial-to-paid conversion 18%.

Technologies belong in the skills section; bullets are for impact. Tying frontend work to a conversion metric is rare on engineering resumes and reads as commercial awareness.

Fixed bugs and improved code quality.

Drove flaky-test rate from 12% to under 1% by quarantining nondeterministic specs and adding CI retry telemetry, cutting mean PR merge time for a team of 14 from 2 days to 4 hours.

Turns invisible maintenance work into a team-level throughput result — the kind of thing that signals senior scope without claiming a title you did not hold.

Common software engineer resume mistakes

A skills section that lists 40 technologies

Listing every language you have opened dilutes the match on the ones that matter and reads as padding. Keep the 12–15 that appear in the job description and that you would be comfortable in a technical interview on.

Burying scale behind vague adjectives

"High-traffic" and "large-scale" are unverifiable. Numbers are: 4M daily requests, 12TB warehouse, 60-person engineering org. If you cannot share exact figures, an order of magnitude is still far better than an adjective.

Listing projects without outcomes

A side project with no users is a tutorial. If you list one, say what it does, who uses it, and what was technically hard about it — otherwise it costs space that experience bullets need.

Two-column layouts that ATS parsers scramble

Many parsers read left-to-right across the whole page, interleaving your sidebar into your experience. For engineering roles specifically, a clean single column parses reliably and loses nothing.

Software Engineer resume FAQ

How long should a software engineer resume be?

One page under roughly 10 years of experience, two pages beyond that. Length is not the real constraint — relevance is. A recruiter spends well under a minute on the first pass, so the strongest three bullets should be visible without scrolling.

Should I include side projects and GitHub?

Include GitHub if the profile has recent, readable work. Include side projects if you are early-career or switching stacks, and treat them exactly like jobs: what it does, who uses it, what was hard. An empty or stale profile is worse than no link.

Do I need a different resume for every job?

You need a different top third. The summary, skills order, and first two bullets of your most recent role should mirror the job description's language. That is the part an ATS weights and a recruiter reads, and it is what nailHiring rewrites for you in a few seconds.

What ATS score should a software engineer resume aim for?

Above 80 against the specific job description is a strong target. Scores below 60 usually mean a stack mismatch or missing role-title keywords rather than weak experience — which is fixable without inventing anything.

Related resume examples

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Tailor this to the job you are actually applying for

Paste the job description and nailHiring rewrites your bullets in your own voice, surfaces the keywords you are missing, and scores the match — free to try.