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Engineering

Software Engineer Resume Example (2026)

Software engineer resumes have to clear two filters: an ATS that matches on exact keywords, then a hiring manager who skims for impact in eight seconds. The example below does both — keyword-dense in the skills section, metric-dense in the bullets, with no fabricated expertise.

Check my software engineer resume See Software Engineer keywords

Sample resume

Software Engineer resume — full example

One-column, ATS-friendly layout. Names and numbers are illustrative.

Jordan Avery

Seattle, WA · jordan.avery@example.com · linkedin.com/in/jordana · github.com/jordana

Senior Software Engineer

Professional Summary

Senior software engineer with 7+ years building production backend systems in Python and Go. Owned services handling 10M+ requests/day at a Series-C fintech; led migration from monolith to event-driven microservices that cut p99 latency by 63%. Comfortable across the stack but happiest in distributed systems and data infrastructure.

Technical Skills

  • Languages: Python, Go, TypeScript, SQL, Bash
  • Frameworks: FastAPI, Django, gRPC, React, Next.js
  • Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, EKS, SQS), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions
  • Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB
  • Practices: CI/CD, TDD, OpenAPI, OpenTelemetry, Code review

Professional Experience

Senior Software Engineer — Mercator Payments

Seattle, WA · Mar 2023 — Present

  • Architected the migration of a 14-year-old Python monolith to 11 event-driven Go microservices, reducing p99 API latency from 480ms to 178ms (-63%) and on-call pages by 41% over six months.
  • Designed an idempotent payout pipeline processing $2.1B/year across four payment processors; engineered exactly-once delivery via Kafka + Postgres outbox, eliminating ~$180K/year of historical double-payment incidents.
  • Led the platform's adoption of OpenTelemetry; instrumented 40+ services, defined three SLOs adopted org-wide, and cut mean time to recovery from 24 to 6 minutes.
  • Mentored 4 mid-level engineers through promotion; designed the team's onboarding rotation that brought time-to-first-PR from 14 days to 4.

Software Engineer — Layered Logic

Remote · Jun 2020 — Feb 2023

  • Built a low-latency feature flag service in Go used by 30+ internal teams; sustained <2ms p99 read latency at 90K RPS with a Redis + in-process LRU caching layer.
  • Authored the company's first internal RFC process and reference architecture for new services; adopted by every team within 8 months and credited with a 35% drop in production incidents in 2022.
  • Migrated CI from Jenkins to GitHub Actions; cut average pipeline duration from 27 to 9 minutes and saved an estimated 1,800 engineer-hours/year.

Software Engineer I — Northvane Health

Boston, MA · Aug 2018 — May 2020

  • Owned the HL7 FHIR ingestion service for 12 hospital partners; built a parsing library now handling 400K records/day with a 99.97% accuracy rate against the manual audit gold set.
  • Implemented HIPAA-compliant audit logging across the platform; passed the company's first SOC 2 Type II audit on time with zero findings in my domain.

Education

  • B.S. Computer Science — Boston University · 2018 · GPA 3.7

Certifications

  • • AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (2024)

Why this resume works

  • Every bullet starts with an action verb (Architected, Designed, Built, Owned) — Aura ATS detects elite verbs and credits them under the Impact layer.
  • Numbers are everywhere: $2.1B, 10M req/day, p99 178ms, 63%, 41%, 35%, 99.97%. The Impact layer weights quantified bullets 100% higher than buzzword bullets.
  • The Skills section names exact technologies a JD will keyword-match against: AWS sub-services (EC2, S3, Lambda) are explicitly listed so the implicit-match layer credits AWS-tagged JDs.
  • Job titles ascend (Engineer I → Engineer → Senior Engineer) — the experience layer detects career progression and adds a small bonus to the score.
  • Education and certifications are short and at the bottom. Recruiters expect them there; burying them up top crowds out impact bullets.

Common mistakes

  • Listing every technology you've ever touched. ATS rewards relevance, not volume — pad the Skills section beyond what the JD asks for and the keyword-stuffing detector flags it.
  • Using passive constructions like 'Responsible for' or 'Worked on'. Those are buzzwords to our readability layer and drop the soft-signals score.
  • Reformatting into two columns or putting key info in graphics. PDF-to-text extraction will miss it — the parseability sub-score is the cheapest one to lose.
  • Dropping numbers because 'I can't share exact figures'. Order-of-magnitude estimates ($1M+, 100K+ users, 10x improvement) work fine and beat vague 'significant impact' claims.

ATS keywords

Software Engineer resume keywords ATS systems scan for

A condensed view. For the full categorized list, see the Software Engineer keywords page.

Hard skills

  • Python
  • Go
  • Java
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • C++
  • Rust
  • SQL
  • Microservices
  • Distributed systems
  • REST APIs
  • GraphQL

Tools

  • AWS
  • EC2
  • S3
  • Lambda
  • RDS
  • DynamoDB
  • EKS
  • SQS
  • GCP
  • Azure
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes

Action verbs

  • Architected
  • Engineered
  • Designed
  • Built
  • Owned
  • Shipped
  • Launched
  • Led
  • Spearheaded
  • Orchestrated
  • Mentored
  • Migrated

Soft skills

  • Cross-functional collaboration
  • Code review
  • Technical mentorship
  • Documentation
  • Incident response
  • On-call
  • Stakeholder communication
  • Estimation
See the full Software Engineer keyword list

Questions

Software Engineer resume — frequently asked

How long should a software engineer resume be?+
One page if you're under five years' experience. Two pages is the ceiling — recruiters rarely scroll past the first. Cut the oldest job to two lines or drop the bullets before adding a second page.
Do I need to list every programming language I've used?+
No. List the ones you'd be comfortable being asked about in a coding interview today. Padding the skills section with languages you used once in school is exactly what the keyword-stuffing detector is built to flag.
Should I include open-source contributions or side projects?+
Yes, if they're substantial (>200 commits, real users, or merged into a project your interviewer will recognize). Add a 'Projects' section under Experience. Single-commit toy repos hurt more than they help.
What format — PDF or DOCX?+
PDF for the application itself. DOCX only when the application portal explicitly demands it. Most ATSes parse both, but PDF preserves your formatting; DOCX can render differently in Microsoft's parser than in yours.
How do I handle a career gap?+
Don't hide it — modern ATSes flag suspicious date jumps. Either include the gap as 'Career break — caretaking / freelance / sabbatical' or fold a freelance project into the timeline. The interview-question generator in our tool builds probes around unexplained gaps, so honest framing beats omission.

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