Should a software engineer resume be one page?

One page under roughly 10 years of experience; two pages for senior/staff careers with patents, talks, or many systems. Recruiters spend seconds on the first pass either way.

Do tech companies use ATS or do recruiters read resumes?

Both: the ATS parses and filters, then recruiters keyword-search the parsed database and skim survivors. Exact technology keywords get you retrieved; quantified impact gets you read.

Should I include a GitHub or portfolio link?

Yes, in the header, if it shows real work: substantial repositories, contributions, or a portfolio. An empty profile is worse than no link.

How do I handle keywords for frameworks I know slightly?

List only what you can defend in an interview. Keyword-stuffing gets retrieved and then rejected at technical screen, burning the opportunity.

Software Engineer resume example

What makes it work

A strong software engineer resume names its stack precisely (languages, frameworks, cloud, infrastructure), quantifies scale (users, requests, data volume, latency) and impact (performance gains, cost savings, incident reduction), and mirrors the posting's exact technology keywords. Tech companies screen with ATS plus recruiter keyword search, so 'built microservices' ranks below 'built Go microservices on Kubernetes handling 40K req/s'.

Wei Zhang

Software Engineer | Backend | Go, Python, Kubernetes | 5 Years

Austin, TX (open to remote) • (555) 555-0100 • name@email.com • linkedin.com/in/example

Summary

Backend software engineer with 5 years building distributed systems in Go and Python. Scaled a payments API from 2K to 40K requests per second on Kubernetes while cutting p99 latency 45%. Strong in PostgreSQL, Kafka, AWS, and observability-driven operations; led a 4-engineer workstream.

Experience

Software Engineer II | Ledgerline (fintech, Series C) | Jul 2022 - Present

•Own the payments-authorization service (Go, PostgreSQL, Kafka) processing $1.2B annually at 40K req/s peak.
•Cut p99 latency from 310ms to 170ms by introducing request coalescing and a Redis read-through cache.
•Led the 4-engineer migration from EC2 to EKS (Kubernetes), reducing infrastructure cost 28% and deploy time from 40 to 6 minutes.
•Drove incident load down 60% year over year by adding SLO-based alerting in Prometheus/Grafana and deleting two flaky legacy services.
•Interview loop member (12+ loops/quarter) and mentor to 2 junior engineers.

Software Engineer | Hexagon Analytics | Jun 2020 - Jun 2022

•Built ETL pipelines in Python and Airflow ingesting 200M events/day into Snowflake for 30 enterprise customers.
•Shipped a self-serve report builder (Django, React) adopted by 80% of customers within two quarters.
•Reduced pipeline failure rate from 4% to 0.3% with idempotent retries and data-quality checks.

Education

B.S. Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin, 2020

Skills

Go • Python • TypeScript • PostgreSQL • Kafka • Redis • Kubernetes • AWS (EKS, RDS, S3, Lambda) • Terraform • CI/CD (GitHub Actions) • Prometheus / Grafana • Distributed systems

Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate (2024)

Keywords ATS look for in a software engineer resume

These terms appear across software engineerpostings and are what screening software ranks on. Use the ones that are true of you, in the posting's exact wording.

software engineer
backend
Go
Python
microservices
distributed systems
Kubernetes
AWS
PostgreSQL
Kafka
CI/CD
Terraform
REST API
system design
observability
latency
scalability
mentorship

Which of these is your resume missing?

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Common software engineer resume mistakes

Stack soup without evidence

Twenty technologies in a skills list with no bullets using them reads as padding. Every named technology should appear in at least one quantified bullet; recruiters search skills, then verify in experience.

No scale or impact numbers

Requests per second, data volume, latency, cost, and incident counts are the currency of engineering resumes. 'Improved performance' is unrankable; '45% p99 reduction' is a hire signal.

Ignoring the posting's exact stack terms

If the posting says 'GCP' and you write only 'cloud', you lose the match. Mirror the exact terms you genuinely have; adjacent experience ('AWS, comparable to the GCP stack you run') belongs in the cover letter.

Projects hidden below old jobs

For early-career engineers, substantial projects with users, GitHub links, and measurable outcomes outrank irrelevant work history. Order sections by strength of evidence.

Start from an ATS-safe template

The Compact template suits most software engineer applications: Candidates with lots of relevant experience who want to stay on one page without shrinking below readable sizes.

Download Compact (DOCX)See all templates

Frequently asked questions

Should a software engineer resume be one page?: One page under roughly 10 years of experience; two pages for senior/staff careers with patents, talks, or many systems. Recruiters spend seconds on the first pass either way.
Do tech companies use ATS or do recruiters read resumes?: Both: the ATS parses and filters, then recruiters keyword-search the parsed database and skim survivors. Exact technology keywords get you retrieved; quantified impact gets you read.
Should I include a GitHub or portfolio link?: Yes, in the header, if it shows real work: substantial repositories, contributions, or a portfolio. An empty profile is worse than no link.
How do I handle keywords for frameworks I know slightly?: List only what you can defend in an interview. Keyword-stuffing gets retrieved and then rejected at technical screen, burning the opportunity.