Software Engineer Resume Example (+ Template)

Mid-level sample (about 6 years' experience)

Mid-level software engineer resume — full sample

JORDAN ELLIS Software Engineer — Backend and Distributed Systems Austin, TX (open to hybrid or remote) · 555-0142 · jordan.ellis@email.com · github.com/jordanellis · linkedin.com/in/jordanellis

SUMMARY Software engineer with 6 years on Python and Go backends behind consumer-facing APIs. Currently own 4 production services on AWS handling about 3,000 requests per second at a p95 of 310 ms, on a 1-week-in-6 on-call rotation. Strongest on service decomposition, payments reliability and cutting cloud spend. Looking for a backend or platform role on a team that reviews code and writes design docs.

EXPERIENCE

Software Engineer II — [Consumer marketplace, ~450 staff], Austin, TX | Jan 2022 – Present - Led the split of a Django monolith into 4 Go services, cutting p95 checkout latency from 940 ms to 310 ms and deploy time from 35 minutes to 6. - Rebuilt the payments retry pipeline in Go, Kafka and PostgreSQL, recovering roughly 1,200 failed transactions a week that previously needed manual replay by 2 support staff. - Cut AWS spend on the search stack by 28% by right-sizing 12 instances and adding request-level caching in Redis, with no change to p99 latency. - Carried on-call for 6 services on a 1-week-in-6 rotation and rewrote 9 runbooks, bringing mean time to acknowledge down from 18 minutes to 5. - Mentored 2 junior engineers and 1 intern through their first production changes; review about 25 pull requests a week.

Software Engineer I — [B2B logistics SaaS, ~120 staff], Remote | Jul 2019 – Dec 2021 - Built 30+ REST endpoints in Python (FastAPI) for a carrier-integration product used by 90 shipper accounts across 3 regions. - Raised test coverage on the billing module from 41% to 86% with pytest, cutting billing defects reported per release from 7 to 1. - Migrated CI from Jenkins to GitHub Actions across 9 repositories, cutting median pipeline time from 22 minutes to 8. - Instrumented 5 services with OpenTelemetry and Datadog dashboards, which traced 3 recurring nightly failures to a single database lock. - Conferred with analysts, support leads and the product manager each sprint to turn 4–6 recurring ticket themes into a ranked backlog.

Software Engineering Intern — [Health-tech startup], Austin, TX | Jun 2018 – Aug 2018 - Shipped an internal admin tool in React and TypeScript that removed about 6 hours a week of manual CSV editing for 3 operations staff.

SKILLS Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript, SQL, Bash Backend and data: FastAPI, Django, gRPC, REST, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch Cloud and infrastructure: AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, S3, RDS), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform Testing and delivery: pytest, Jest, Playwright, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, trunk-based development Observability: Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry Ways of working: code review, design docs and RFCs, Scrum, incident response and postmortems

EDUCATION B.S. Computer Science — [State university], 2019

LICENCES AND CERTIFICATIONS - AWS Certified Developer – Associate, Amazon Web Services, 2022 - Professional Scrum Master level I, Scrum.org, 2023 - No occupational licence is required to work as a software engineer.

Read the dates: the degree finishes in 2019, the internship sits in the summer before it, the first full-time title starts weeks after graduation, and the second title is a promotion inside the same career story. If your own dates have gaps, leave them as gaps rather than stretching a title to cover them — titles and dates are the two things a background check confirms.

Entry-level variant

Entry-level software engineer resume — short sample

PRIYA NATARAJAN Junior Software Engineer — Full Stack Manchester, UK (open to hybrid) · priya.natarajan@email.com · github.com/pnatarajan · linkedin.com/in/priyanatarajan

SUMMARY Computer science graduate (2025) with a 12-week engineering internship and 2 deployed side projects in TypeScript and Python. Ship React and Node.js features with tests and CI on every repository. Looking for a first full-time role on a product team that pairs and reviews code.

EXPERIENCE

Software Engineering Intern — [Fintech company], Manchester | Jun 2024 – Aug 2024 - Shipped 11 tickets to production in 12 weeks, including a React form flow used in 4 onboarding screens. - Wrote 60+ Jest and Playwright tests for the sign-up journey, catching 3 regressions before release. - Fixed a pagination bug in a Node.js API that had returned duplicate rows on about 1 in 20 requests.

PROJECTS - Transit-delay tracker (TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Docker): polls 2 public APIs every 5 minutes and serves a dashboard; about 120 monthly users, deployed with GitHub Actions. - Study-group scheduler (Python, FastAPI, React): 18 REST endpoints, 85% test coverage with pytest, written with 2 coursemates over 8 weeks.

EDUCATION BSc (Hons) Computer Science, 2:1 — [University], 2025. Modules: distributed systems, databases, algorithms, software engineering group project (team of 5).

SKILLS TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, SQL · React, Node.js, FastAPI · PostgreSQL, Redis · Git, GitHub Actions, Docker · Jest, Playwright, pytest · Linux, REST APIs

CERTIFICATIONS AWS Certified Developer – Associate, Amazon Web Services — in progress, exam booked for March 2026.

The entry-level version puts projects above skills and gives each project a stack, a size and a sign of use. A project with no numbers reads as a tutorial you followed; a project with request counts, test counts or users reads as software you maintained.

1. Header. Name on its own line at 16–18 points, then a role line that matches the job you are applying for (Software Engineer, Backend Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer), then one line of contacts: city and work preference, phone, email, GitHub, LinkedIn, and a portfolio or personal site if it works. Skip your street address, date of birth, marital status and photo. Requirements differ by country — some European and Asian markets still expect a photo or date of birth, so check local convention before you strip it out. Make the GitHub link count: if the profile is empty or the pinned repos are unfinished tutorials, leave it off.

1. Summary. Three or four lines, no pronouns needed. Use this formula:

[Level and title] with [X] years in [stack or domain]. [One sentence of current scope in engineering units.] [One sentence on the strongest two or three things you do.] [One sentence on the kind of role you want.]

Example 1 — backend, mid-level

Software engineer with 6 years on Go and Python services. Own 4 production services on AWS serving about 3,000 requests per second at a p95 of 310 ms, plus a 1-week-in-6 on-call rotation. Strongest on service decomposition, payments reliability and cloud cost work. Looking for a backend or platform role on a product team.

Example 2 — full stack, career changer with 2 years' experience

Full-stack engineer, 2 years in TypeScript and Python after 6 years in data analysis. Ship React and FastAPI features end to end for an internal tool used by 400 staff, including the reporting layer that replaced 9 spreadsheets. Fluent in SQL and query tuning. Looking for a product engineering role where engineers talk to users.

Two rules: no adjectives you cannot evidence, and no summary that would fit any engineer on earth. If you could paste your summary onto a stranger's resume without changing a word, it says nothing.

1. Experience. Reverse chronological. For each role give the title, the employer and a one-clause description of it (sector and rough headcount — useful when the name means nothing to the reader), the location or Remote, and the month and year range. Then 3–5 bullets, most for the current role, fewest for the oldest.

Bullet formula:

Action verb + what you built or changed + the system and stack + the scope or effect in engineering units.

The units engineers recognise: requests per second, p95 or p99 latency in milliseconds, number of services, users or accounts, deploys per week, pipeline minutes, test coverage percentage, incidents or pages per rotation, defects per release, cloud spend, rows or events processed, pull requests reviewed, size of team.

Example bullets to model:

• Designed and shipped a gRPC inventory service in Go that replaced 3 cron jobs and cut nightly sync time from 4 hours to 25 minutes.
• Migrated 14 repositories from Jenkins to GitHub Actions, dropping median CI time from 22 minutes to 8 and removing 2 self-hosted runners.
• Cut p99 latency on the search endpoint from 1.8 s to 420 ms by adding a Redis read-through cache and 2 composite Postgres indexes.
• Wrote the design doc for multi-region failover, reviewed by 6 engineers, and delivered phase 1 across 3 services in one quarter.
• Raised coverage on the checkout package from 38% to 84% with pytest and contract tests, taking release regressions from 5 per quarter to 1.
• Conferred with systems analysts and support leads each sprint to turn recurring tickets into 4–6 ranked backlog items, a practice the team kept after I moved projects.
• Reduced Kubernetes node count from 22 to 15 by setting resource requests from 30 days of Prometheus data, saving roughly 30% on the cluster bill.
• Handled 9 production incidents as incident commander over 12 months and wrote each postmortem; 2 of the 6 follow-up actions became platform-wide defaults.
• Onboarded 3 new engineers with a paired-first-week plan; each shipped to production inside 5 working days.
• Built a React and TypeScript admin console used daily by 40 operations staff, replacing a spreadsheet process that took 6 hours a week.

Where you cannot measure the effect, measure the scope. "Built 30+ REST endpoints for a product used by 90 accounts" is honest and still specific. Never invent a percentage — you will be asked how you measured it.

1. Skills. Group them into 4–6 labelled lines rather than one long comma soup: Languages; Backend and data; Frontend; Cloud and infrastructure; Testing and delivery; Observability. List versions or dialects only where they matter (Python 3, Java 17, React 18). Mirror the wording of the job ad when it is true of you — if they write "Kubernetes", do not write only "k8s". No star ratings, no skill bars, no percentages of fluency; a reviewer cannot act on them and they waste space. Keep the list to things you would be happy to be questioned on for 10 minutes.

1. Education. Degree, subject, institution and year, most recent first. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers typically need a bachelor's degree in computer and information technology or a related field such as engineering or mathematics, and that some employers prefer a master's (BLS, 2025) — so put the degree on the page if you have one. BLS also notes that students may gain experience by completing an internship, such as at a software company, while in college (BLS, 2025); list internships in experience, not education. Graduated more than about 5 years ago? One line, no modules, no GPA unless an employer asks. Bootcamp or self-taught? Give the programme name, its length in weeks and what you built, then let projects and experience carry the weight.

1. Licences and certifications. There is no occupational licence for software engineering in most countries, so this section is about vendor and practice certifications. O*NET lists certifications associated with the software developer occupation including AWS Certified Developer – Associate (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate (Microsoft), Professional Scrum Master level I (Scrum.org) and Cisco Certified DevNet Associate (Cisco Systems). Give the exact certification name, the issuing body and the year; add "in progress" with the booked exam month if that is where you are. Two or three relevant certifications help; a list of ten unrelated ones reads as collecting. If a title is protected in your country — "engineer" is regulated in some jurisdictions — use the title your employer gave you and check local rules before claiming anything else.

Formatting, in exact numbers: one page for up to 10 years of experience, two pages maximum after that; 10–11 point body text and 16–18 point name; margins between 0.6 and 1.0 inch on all sides; line spacing 1.0–1.15; one column, because two-column layouts read out of order in some parsers; a single font family throughout; export to PDF and name the file Firstname-Lastname-Software-Engineer.pdf.

The weak versions are all things real engineers write. Each one describes a job; each strong version describes work that happened.

Pair 1 — owning services

Weak

Responsible for maintaining backend microservices in a cloud environment.

Strong

Own 4 Go services on AWS ECS serving about 3,000 requests per second at a p95 of 310 ms, including a 1-week-in-6 on-call rotation and 9 runbooks.

Pair 2 — performance work

Weak

Improved application performance and optimised database queries.

Strong

Cut p99 latency on the search endpoint from 1.8 s to 420 ms with a Redis read-through cache and 2 composite Postgres indexes, verified over 14 days in Datadog.

Pair 3 — testing and quality

Weak

Wrote unit tests and helped improve code quality across the codebase.

Strong

Raised coverage on the billing module from 41% to 86% with pytest and contract tests, cutting billing defects reported per release from 7 to 1.

Pair 4 — delivery and tooling

Weak

Worked with CI/CD pipelines and helped the team deploy more frequently.

Strong

Migrated 9 repositories from Jenkins to GitHub Actions, cutting median pipeline time from 22 minutes to 8 and taking the team from 2 deploys a week to 11.

The pattern to copy: name the system, name the stack, give the before and after, and say how you know. If you cannot recall exact figures, use the ones you can defend — counts of services, repositories, endpoints, accounts, incidents or people. A defensible "about" beats a made-up precise number, and it beats a vague verb every time.

Pick the 8–12 that are true of you and relevant to the advertisement. BLS lists analytical skills, communication skills, creativity, attention to detail, interpersonal skills and problem-solving skills as important qualities for this occupation (BLS, 2025) — which is why the soft skills below belong in bullets, never as bare adjectives.

Drop anything you could not answer a follow-up question on. Interviewers pick skills off the list precisely because you chose to put them there.

Pay for software engineers is usually a package rather than a single number. The typical components are a base salary, sometimes an annual or quarterly bonus tied to company or individual performance, and at product companies and startups some form of equity — restricted stock units on a vesting schedule, or options with a strike price. Some employers add an on-call allowance, a learning or equipment budget, and a location-based band. Contract and agency work is usually a day rate or hourly rate with no equity and fewer benefits, so comparing it to a salaried offer means costing out leave, sick pay, pension or retirement contributions and healthcare yourself.

What moves the number most:

• Level. Junior, mid, senior, staff and principal bands are usually defined internally, and the step between them is larger than the step between employers at the same level.
• Specialisation. Platform, infrastructure, machine learning, security, embedded and low-latency work often sit on different bands from general product engineering.
• Employer type. A large product company, a bank, a consultancy, a public body and an early-stage startup will each weight base, bonus and equity differently for the same work.
• Location and remote policy. Many employers band pay by city or country even for remote roles; some apply a single national band. Ask which it is before you negotiate.
• Scope you can evidence. On-call ownership, systems with real traffic, and having led a migration or a design others reviewed are the things that move you up a level, and levels move pay.

For current figures in the United States, go to the source rather than to aggregator averages. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes median annual pay for software developers and, separately, for software quality assurance analysts and testers (BLS, May 2025), along with a 2025 median for the combined occupation group in its quick facts, and projections for overall employment growth and projected annual openings across 2025–35. CareerOneStop, also from the U.S. Department of Labor, presents BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics pay data for software developers (SOC 15-1252) by state and metro area, with the survey year stated on the page (CareerOneStop, 2024 data). Outside the United States, check your national statistics agency or labour ministry, plus any published public-sector pay scales, which are often the only fully transparent bands available.

On progression: BLS notes that software developers can advance to become project management specialists or computer and information systems managers (BLS, 2025). If management is not the goal, the senior and staff engineering track exists at most larger employers — worth asking about in the interview, because it tells you how the employer thinks about scope and pay for people who keep building.

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If you are unsure which title to apply under, note that O*NET lists Application Developer, DevOps Engineer, Software Architect, Software Development Engineer and Software Engineer among the sample job titles for the software developer occupation — the same resume usually works across them with a change to the role line under your name and a reordered skills block.