Software Engineer — Resume Example & ATS Keywords
Recruiters scan an engineering resume for impact, not job duties. Lead every bullet with a strong verb, name the technology, and quantify the result — latency, cost, users, revenue.
Professional summary example
Senior software engineer with 7 years building and scaling distributed backends in C#/.NET and TypeScript. Shipped an order platform handling 1.2M transactions a month and cut checkout latency by 38%. Comfortable owning a service end to end — design, delivery pipeline, on-call — and raising the bar for the engineers around me.
Example bullet points
- Designed and shipped a microservices order platform (C#/.NET, AWS) processing 1.2M orders/month, cutting checkout latency 38%.
- Led migration of a legacy monolith to containerized services (Docker, Kubernetes), reducing deploy time from 2 hours to 12 minutes.
- Built CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Terraform) that raised release frequency from monthly to daily with zero-downtime deploys.
- Optimized SQL Server queries and added Redis caching, dropping p95 API response time from 900ms to 210ms.
- Mentored 4 junior developers through code reviews and pairing; team defect rate fell 25% over two quarters.
Writing tips for this role
- Put a skills section with exact technology names (C#, React, AWS) — ATS filters match literal keywords from the job post.
- Quantify at least half your bullets: %, time saved, users served, money earned or saved.
- Mirror the job description's terms (e.g. "REST APIs", "unit testing") where they are true for you.
- Keep it to 1–2 pages, single column, no tables or graphics — parsers still choke on layout tricks.
ATS keywords to include
Common questions
How long should a software engineer resume be?
One page for under five years of experience, two at most beyond that. Recruiters spend seconds on the first pass, and a third page almost never gets read. Cut the oldest roles to a single line rather than dropping the recent detail.
Should I list every technology I have touched?
No. List what you could be interviewed on tomorrow. A padded skills section is the fastest way to fail a technical screen, and ATS filters match the job post's terms — not the length of your list.
Do I need a GitHub link or portfolio?
Include it when the code is something you would walk an interviewer through. An empty or abandoned profile costs you more than no link at all.
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Turn these examples into your resume
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