Software Engineer Resume Example

Also called Software Developer, SWE, Programmer.

Engineering managers skim for three things: what you built, how large it was, and what got better because of it. A list of technologies without those reads like a course catalog.

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Opens in the builder with this text in place, ready for you to replace with your own.

What this example does well

  • Each job opens with what he owned and its scale in requests, clinics or services.
  • Performance work is given as before and after, with the cause of the improvement.
  • The skills list is short and every item on it shows up in a bullet above.

Updated

Daniel Osei

Senior Software Engineer

Summary

Software engineer with seven years of experience building backend services in Go and Python. Owns the payments service at a logistics company, which handles 40 million requests a day at 99.98% availability. Likes small pull requests, clear runbooks and teaching on-call to new engineers.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Pierline Logistics

Mar 2022 – Present · Seattle, Washington

  • Own the payments service (Go, PostgreSQL, Kafka), which handles 40 million requests a day at 99.98% availability.
  • Cut p95 latency of the checkout API from 480 ms to 190 ms by removing N+1 queries and adding a read-through cache.
  • Led the move from a shared monolith database to per-service schemas with no downtime, across 14 services.
  • Mentor three engineers and run the team's on-call training.

Software Engineer, Tallgrass Health

Jun 2019 – Feb 2022 · Portland, Oregon

  • Built the appointment scheduling API in Python and FastAPI, used by 220 clinics.
  • Raised test coverage of the billing module from 41% to 86% and cut production defects by half within two quarters.
  • Wrote the deployment pipeline in GitHub Actions that took releases from weekly to several times a day.

Education

BS Computer Science, Oregon State University

2015 – 2019 · Corvallis, Oregon

Skills

Go, Python, PostgreSQL, Kafka, AWS, Docker and Kubernetes, REST and gRPC APIs, System design, Observability

An example: Daniel Osei is not a real person, and the details show the kind of thing to write rather than a real career. Shown in the Mono template. Words that postings for this job often use are marked in yellow.

How do you write a summary for a software engineer resume?

Two to four lines at the top that say what you do, for how long, and what you are best at. Here is one for each stage of a career.

  • Entry level

    Computer science graduate with two internships and a capstone project that serves 1,500 students. Comfortable in Python and TypeScript, with tests and code review as habits. Looking for a team where I can ship real features and learn from senior engineers.

  • Experienced

    Software engineer with four years of backend experience in Python and Go. Builds and runs APIs used by thousands of customers, writes tests as part of the work and takes part in the on-call rotation.

  • Senior

    Staff software engineer with eleven years of experience designing distributed systems. Set the technical direction for a platform used by 60 engineers, led two zero-downtime migrations and turned a team with weekly incidents into one with a quiet pager.

How to write a resume summary, with more examples

What are good bullet points for a software engineer resume?

Each starts with a verb and says what was done. Change the details and numbers to your own; a number you cannot explain in an interview is worse than none.

  1. Built and maintained REST APIs in Go serving 12 million requests a day.

  2. Reduced p95 response time from 600 ms to 220 ms by adding indexes and caching hot queries.

  3. Designed the event pipeline on Kafka that replaced nightly batch jobs with updates in seconds.

  4. Wrote unit and integration tests that raised coverage from 45% to 85% and halved regressions.

  5. Led a zero-downtime database migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

  6. Set up continuous deployment, taking releases from once a week to many times a day.

  7. Took part in a weekly on-call rotation and cut alert noise by 70% by rewriting alert rules.

  8. Reviewed around 15 pull requests a week and wrote the team's review guidelines.

  9. Broke a monolith into six services with clear ownership and contracts.

  10. Mentored two junior engineers, both promoted within 18 months.

Which skills should a software engineer put on a resume?

Pick the ones the job posting asks for and that you can back up with an example from your work.

Hard skills

  • Programming languages (Python, Go, Java, TypeScript)
  • API design (REST, gRPC, GraphQL)
  • Relational and NoSQL databases
  • Cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
  • Containers and Kubernetes
  • Automated testing
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • System design
  • Monitoring and incident response

Soft skills

  • Clear written communication
  • Code review that teaches
  • Breaking down vague problems
  • Ownership
  • Mentoring

Licenses and certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate
  • Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

Which keywords belong on a software engineer resume?

The words recruiters and applicant tracking systems search for.

  • Go
  • Python
  • PostgreSQL
  • Kafka
  • latency
  • availability
  • on-call
  • API
  • test coverage
  • deployment pipeline

Use the ones that are true for you, written the way the posting writes them, and put each where it shows something you did. A list of keywords with nothing behind it helps nobody. To keep them readable by software, choose an ATS-friendly template, and read how applicant tracking systems read a resume.

How technical should a software engineer resume be?

Technical enough that another engineer can picture the system, and plain enough that a recruiter can follow it. Name the language, the datastore and the scale in one line, then say what changed: faster, cheaper, more reliable, used by more people.

Skip tools everyone is assumed to know and versions nobody checks. Space on the page is better spent on a second result than on "Git, Jira, VS Code".

Should you include side projects and GitHub?

Early in your career, yes. A project that real people use, with a readable repository, stands in for work experience. Link it and describe it like a job: what it does, what you built it with, who uses it.

With several years of experience, keep the link in the header and drop the projects section unless a project is directly relevant to the role.

What do technology employers look for in a resume?

  • Tie each tool to something you did with it. A skills list of twenty languages says little; a bullet that names the service you built in one of them says a lot.
  • Say what changed because of your work: a faster page, fewer incidents, a report that people now use every week.
  • Match the words in the job posting. If it says Kubernetes, write Kubernetes and not only "container orchestration", because screening software and tired recruiters both search for the exact word.

All technology resume examples

Questions about a software engineer resume

How long should a software engineer resume be?

One page for up to about eight years of experience, two beyond that. Older jobs can shrink to a title, a company and one line.

Where do programming languages go?

In a short skills section, and again inside the bullets where you used them. The second place is what convinces people.

Do I need a summary?

It helps if it says something specific, such as your specialty and the largest system you have owned. A generic summary is worse than none.

Which template works for engineering roles?

A plain one-column design. Many tech companies parse resumes into their own forms, and simple layouts survive that best. This example uses Mono.

Make this software engineer resume yours.

Start from the example, swap in your own jobs and numbers, and switch to any template without retyping a word.

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