Software engineer CV template and example

What a hiring manager checks in the first pass

An engineering manager reading a pile of applications is not scoring your adjectives. They want to know whether you have worked on systems like theirs, at roughly the scale they run, with the languages their team writes. They look at your most recent job title, the kind of company, and the first three bullets under it. If those line up with the advert, they read on. If the top of the page is a paragraph about being passionate about clean code, they usually do not.

So put the evidence where the eye lands. Your name and links, a summary of two or three lines, then experience. Skills and education go underneath. For a mid-level engineer with five or so years behind them, two pages is fine; one page is fine too if everything useful fits.

Write the stack into the bullets, not a logo wall

A grid of twenty technologies with star ratings tells the reader nothing about what you did with any of them. Worse, it invites the interviewer to ask about the one you touched once. Name each tool where you used it: "Moved card payment reconciliation from a nightly cron job to an event-driven Node.js service on AWS Lambda and SQS" says TypeScript, Node, AWS and messaging in one line, and it says why.

Keep a short skills section as well, because recruiters and applicant tracking systems search on exact terms. Group it by type (languages, frameworks, data, cloud and tooling) and list only what you would be happy to be quizzed on. If the advert says PostgreSQL, write PostgreSQL rather than just SQL.

How to write impact when you did not own the product

Most engineers work on a team and cannot claim revenue. You do not need to. Good engineering bullets describe a change and its effect on something measurable that you saw yourself: latency, error rates, build times, on-call pages, the number of manual steps in a release. If you have a rough figure, give it and be ready to explain how you know. If you do not, describe the before and after in words: "replaced a manual database migration step that had caused two failed releases".

Show judgement too. Mid-level and senior roles look for people who made a trade-off and could explain it: choosing a queue over a synchronous call, deleting a service, writing the design doc, mentoring a junior through their first on-call week. One bullet like that per role does more than three that say "wrote unit tests".

GitHub, portfolios and side projects

Link your GitHub only if a stranger would learn something good from it in two minutes. A profile of forked tutorials and empty repositories helps nobody. If most of your work sits in private company repositories, that is normal, and you can leave the link out. A pinned project with a clear README, tests and a short note on why you built it is worth more than a green contribution graph.

Side projects earn a section when they fill a gap in your paid work. A backend engineer applying for a role with a React front end could list a small full-stack project, with one line on what it does and the stack. Open source contributions count as experience; give the project name and what was merged.

Getting past recruiters and keyword filters

Many tech roles in the UK are filled through agency recruiters and in-house talent teams before an engineer sees your CV. Those first readers match terms from the job spec. Use the same spellings as the advert (Kubernetes, not K8s, unless they write K8s), put the job title you are targeting in your summary, and keep the layout simple enough for an applicant tracking system to parse: one column, standard headings, no text inside images or tables. You can run your file through the free ATS CV checker to see how it parses.

Pitching for mid-level or senior

Titles vary so much between companies that the reader will judge your level from the scope of your bullets. For a senior backend post, the reader wants signs that you set direction: you picked the approach, others built on it, and you reviewed their work. For a mid-level post, show that you deliver features end to end with little supervision. Say which one you are going for in the summary, and order your bullets so the most senior-looking work comes first.

Education and certificates

After a few years in work, your degree needs one line: subject, university, classification and years. There are other routes in, including software developer apprenticeships and the Digital and Technology Solutions degree apprenticeship, and they belong in this section with the same weight as a degree. Cloud certificates such as AWS or Azure are worth listing if the advert mentions that platform, with the year you passed.

Mistakes that sink engineering CVs

• Percentages with no baseline, such as "improved performance by 40%". Say what was measured and from what to what, or leave the number out.
• Listing every framework you have ever installed. Interviewers will pick the weakest one.
• Describing the company product instead of your part in it.
• Hiding the most relevant job on page two because it was not your latest.
• A two-column design that an ATS reads in the wrong order.
• Dates without months, which makes short contracts look like gaps.

Software developer pay

The National Careers Service gives an average of £30,000 a year for a starter software developer and £75,000 for an experienced one. London and specialist roles often pay above that range.