How to write a software engineer resume that gets interviews

Engineering resumes are read by a recruiter first and an engineer second. The recruiter looks for the right technologies and level; the engineer looks for evidence that you shipped things that mattered.

Structure

1. Header: name, email, city, links to GitHub or a portfolio if they are worth opening.
2. Skills: languages, frameworks, infrastructure and data stores, grouped on three or four lines.
3. Experience: reverse order, three to five bullets per role.
4. Projects: for students and juniors, or when a project shows a skill your jobs do not.
5. Education.

One page up to about eight years of experience; two at most beyond that.

Bullets: what, how, result

• "Reduced API response time from 900 ms to 180 ms by adding caching and rewriting three slow queries."
• "Led the migration of 40 services to Kubernetes with zero downtime; cut deployment time from 30 minutes to 4."
• "Built the checkout flow in React and TypeScript used by 200,000 customers a month; conversion rose 6%."

If you lack a business number, use a technical one: latency, error rate, build time, test coverage, number of users or services.

Skills section

List what you can discuss in an interview. Order by strength, and match the advert's wording for the technologies you really know. Drop the long tail of tools you touched once.

Projects

Name, one line on what it does, the stack, and something concrete: users, stars, a performance figure or a link.

What to cut

• A summary that says "passionate engineer".
• Every technology you have ever seen.
• Responsibilities without outcomes: "worked on the backend".
• Skill bars and ratings.

Tailoring

Read the advert, move the most relevant bullets to the top of each role, and check that the key technologies appear in both skills and experience. Keep the file a clean, single-column PDF so it parses correctly.