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Software Engineer Resume — structure and examples

Write a software engineer resume that survives technical screening: impact bullets, honest skill lists, project evidence and ATS-safe formatting.

Engineering recruiters and hiring managers skim for signal: what you built, what changed because of it, and which parts you owned. Everything else is context.

Recommended structure

  1. Header — name, title, email, GitHub or portfolio if it is good
  2. Summary — three lines: years, domain, one defining strength
  3. Experience — reverse chronological with impact bullets
  4. Projects — for anything open source or substantial that your job history does not show
  5. Skills — grouped by kind, plain words, no proficiency bars
  6. Education — last, unless you are a new graduate

Bullets that work

  • Cut p95 checkout latency from 840ms to 310ms by batching inventory lookups
  • Owned the migration of 42 endpoints to a typed API with zero downtime
  • Introduced contract tests that reduced integration regressions across three teams
  • Mentored two junior engineers to independent feature ownership

Skills lists, honestly

List what you would be comfortable being interviewed on tomorrow. Grouping helps: languages, frameworks, data, infrastructure, practices. Removing a skill you half-know is worth more than adding three you have only read about.

Common mistakes

  • Technology lists with no evidence of what you did with them
  • Resumes that describe the team rather than your contribution
  • Two columns and icons that break extraction in screening tools
  • Bullets longer than 34 words
  • A GitHub link to an empty profile