Software Engineer resume example — ATS-friendly, 2026
A working software engineer resume — written for the parsers used by Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, and iCIMS, and tuned for US-market job descriptions where stack-match is the dominant signal.
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Professional summary — Software Engineer
The first paragraph of a Software Engineer resume sets the ATS keyword density and the recruiter’s first impression. Treat it as the highest-leverage 60 words on the page.
Example summary
Full-stack software engineer with 6+ years building production systems on AWS in Python and TypeScript. Shipped the order-events platform serving 14M daily requests at p95 < 120ms, and mentored four junior engineers through code reviews and on-call rotations. Comfortable owning a service end-to-end — from design doc to incident postmortem.
Skills snapshot — Software Engineer
Group skills by type and lead with the ones the JD weights most. Modern ATS systems deduplicate near-matches — list each skill once, with the exact spelling US recruiters use.
Core skills
Tools & platforms
Work experience — sample bullets
Lead each bullet with a verb in past tense. Pair the system or program with a numeric outcome — recruiters and ATS systems both score quantified bullets higher than responsibility lists.
Senior Software Engineer
Jun 2023 – Present
Mercato Labs · Austin, TX
- Owned the order-events pipeline (Go + Kafka + Redis Streams) processing 14M events/day; cut end-to-end latency from 1.2s p95 to 110ms.
- Led the migration of 9 services from EC2 to ECS Fargate, reducing infrastructure cost 41% and eliminating 3 classes of deploy-time incidents.
- Mentored 4 mid-level engineers through structured design reviews; two were promoted to senior within 12 months.
- Designed the OIDC migration that retired 4 legacy session stores and reduced auth-related on-call pages 70% YoY.
Software Engineer
Aug 2020 – May 2023
Brightline Logistics · Remote
- Shipped the shipper portal in Next.js + tRPC for 3,800 daily users; achieved 99.95% uptime over 18 months.
- Cut p95 search latency from 880ms to 140ms by introducing a Postgres full-text index and a Redis cache layer.
- Wrote the team's CI/CD playbook in GitHub Actions; reduced average deploy time from 22 minutes to 6.
Education, certifications & extras
Education
B.S. Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Notable projects
Open-sourced `pgrls` — a Postgres row-level-security helper for TypeScript (1.4k+ GitHub stars).
Resume keywords for Software Engineer JDs
The keyword cluster US Software Engineer JDs scan for in 2026. Match the JD’s exact spelling — near-matches are deduplicated, but verbatim overlap is rewarded.
Must-have keywords
Nice-to-have keywords
Resume tips for Software Engineer candidates
- 1
Lead each bullet with a verb in past tense — "Built," "Shipped," "Owned" — followed by the system, the stack, and a numeric outcome.
- 2
Match the JD's spelling exactly. "PostgreSQL" and "Postgres" do not always score the same; "React.js," "ReactJS," and "React" deduplicate unevenly across ATS platforms.
- 3
Keep the skills list defendable. If you list Kafka, expect to be asked about consumer groups, offsets, and rebalancing in the interview.
- 4
Quantify with two numbers per bullet when you can — one operational (latency, requests, users) and one business (cost, retention, revenue).
- 5
Move the most JD-relevant project to the top of the Experience section even if it's not chronological — recruiters spend 7 seconds on the first scan.
- 6
Skip the photo, the skills bar charts, and the two-column layouts. Modern parsers handle them inconsistently and you get penalized silently.
FAQ
Questions about Software Engineer resume examples
How long should a software engineer resume be in the US market?
One page for under 10 years of experience; two pages only if you have staff-or-above scope to justify it. US recruiters consistently rank one-page resumes higher on first-pass screens, and ATS scoring is content-density-driven, not page-count-driven.
Should I include a GitHub link on my software engineer resume?
Yes — but only if the top three pinned repositories have a README, recent commits, and code you'd want a hiring manager to read. An empty GitHub link is a minor negative signal; a curated one is one of the strongest positive signals on a developer resume.
Do ATS systems penalize a 'Skills' section that's just a long keyword list?
Most modern parsers don't penalize it, but recruiters do once it reaches them. Group skills by category (Languages, Frameworks, Cloud, Data) and cap at 25 — beyond that, recruiters discount the entire section.
What's the right way to handle a stack that doesn't match the JD perfectly?
Lead with the closest-equivalent in your stack and frame the gap as transferable: "Built production services in Go (analogous to Rust expectations) — comfortable with systems languages and ownership of memory and concurrency." Don't list a tool you've never used; ATS scoring is converging with LLM-based verification.
Can I use a Canva or Figma template for my software engineer resume?
Only if it produces a single-column, parser-readable PDF with selectable text. Run the file through ResumeFit AI's checker — if the parser sees less than 95% of your content, the template is silently filtering you out.
Keep going
Build the rest of your Software Engineer resume
Resume skills for Software Engineer
The hard skills, soft skills, and ATS keywords US Software Engineer job descriptions weight most.
Resume summary for Software Engineer
Software Engineer resume summary examples for every career stage — entry, mid, and senior.
ATS-friendly resume guide for Software Engineer
The keywords, the pitfalls, and the bullet structure that pass ATS filters for Software Engineer roles.
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