Software engineer CV template

What recruiters look for in a software engineer CV

Technical recruiters make two passes. The first is a keyword scan: does your CV contain the languages, frameworks and infrastructure named in the job description? The second is a credibility scan: do your bullets read like someone who shipped real software, or like a list of course topics? A strong engineering CV survives both by naming its stack explicitly and tying every technology to something it was used to build.

Seniority is communicated through scope, not adjectives. "Led migration of a payments service used by 2M customers" says senior; "highly experienced engineer" says nothing. Keep your title accurate, let the bullets carry the level, and never inflate a mid-level role into a lead role, because the interview will find out.

Structure: which sections, in which order

For engineers with two or more years of experience, the order that works is: a two to three line summary, professional experience, projects (if they add something your job history does not), education, then skills. Recent graduates should flip experience and projects, because a substantial side project with real users often outweighs a short internship.

The skills section should be a plain, grouped list: languages, frameworks, infrastructure and tooling. Skip the progress bars and self-ratings for skills; "Python (5 years, production)" carries information, a four-out-of-five dot rating does not. Recruiters search this section, so phrase skills exactly the way job ads phrase them: "React", not "React.js ecosystem work".

Writing bullets that sound like shipped software

The formula that works is action, thing built, measurable outcome. Start with a concrete verb (built, migrated, reduced, automated), name the system and its stack, and end with what changed: latency, cost, error rate, revenue, developer time. Not every bullet needs a number, but a CV with zero numbers reads as untested.

Cut anything a hiring manager cannot verify or picture: "worked on various backend tasks" is filler, "cut p95 checkout latency from 900ms to 240ms by moving cart pricing to a Redis cache" is a story they will ask about in the interview. Three to five bullets per role is plenty; lead with the most impressive one.

Common software engineer CV mistakes

The classics: listing every technology ever touched (dilutes the search hits that matter), burying the stack inside paragraphs (parsers and skimmers miss it), spending bullets on routine duties like code review and standups (assumed at every level), and a two-column layout with the experience squeezed into a narrow strip. Keep one page per decade of experience as a rule of thumb, and export to PDF so the layout is identical on every machine.