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Resume for a Software Engineer

A developer resume fails when it lists a stack and calls that an achievement. The reader wants to know what you owned, at what scale, and what changed.

What a recruiter checks first

In roughly this order, in the first fifteen seconds.

The same experience, written twice

Left is what most software engineer resumes say. Right is the same claim, made properly.

Before
Worked on microservices using Java, Spring Boot, Kafka and Docker
Involved in CI/CD pipeline improvements
Part of the team that migrated to AWS
After
Owned 4 Spring Boot services handling 12M events/day through Kafka; p99 down from 800ms to 210ms
Cut pipeline runtime from 42 to 9 minutes, taking the team from weekly to daily releases
Led migration of 3 services to AWS with no customer-facing downtime

Illustrative examples — not an actual customer's resume.

Terms an ATS filters on

Use the ones that are true of you, in the experience itself rather than stuffed into a list.

  • system design
  • microservices
  • REST APIs
  • CI/CD
  • unit testing
  • code review
  • cloud infrastructure
  • on-call

The mistake specific to this role

A forty-item skills list. It tells a reader you have used a computer. Separate what you are strong in from what you have touched, and let the experience prove the first group.

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