Software Engineer résumés: what 435 live postings ask for
We read 435 currently-open software engineer postings and counted what they name. Below: the requirements, then a worked example measured against them.
A worked demonstration — written by us, not a real person's résumé. It covers 10 of the 20 things those postings ask for most, so you can see the shape of an answer rather than take our word for it.
Opens in the editor as your own document. No account, and it never leaves your browser.
What 435 live Software Engineer postings actually ask for
Not advice — a count. We read 435 currently-open software engineer postings across United States, United Kingdom, Germany and more and counted how many name each skill. 44% are remote.
Hiring now: Speechify · JPMorganChase · Canonical Ltd. · Confluent · Leica Microsystems · NEURA Robotics
Counted from live postings our engine collected — no survey, no estimate. Put a skill on your résumé only if it is genuinely yours.
What a software engineer résumé has to show
- Languages and frameworks in a plain, comma-separated skills line — parsers lift this verbatim
- Scope: how many services, how much traffic, how large the team
- A result per bullet, not a duty — latency, cost, throughput, defect rate
- Recent work first; anything older than ten years is a line, not a paragraph
Bullets you can adapt
Every one names a system or a surface, a change, and a number. Take the shape, not the figures — substitute your own and keep them defensible.
- Cut p95 API latency from 840ms to 190ms by adding a read-through cache and removing two N+1 queries
- Migrated 23 services from EC2 to EKS with Terraform; deploy time dropped from 25 minutes to 7
- Reduced production incidents 40% in two quarters by introducing contract tests across 9 service boundaries
- Shipped the billing rewrite that now processes €4.2M/month with zero reconciliation failures
- Brought CI from 22 minutes to 6 by parallelising the suite and caching dependency layers
- Owned the migration from REST to GraphQL for 14 client teams without a breaking change
- Cut infrastructure spend 31% ($96k/yr) by right-sizing instances and moving batch jobs to spot
- Raised test coverage on the payments path from 41% to 88% ahead of the PCI audit
And the ones to cut
These are duties and adjectives. They describe a job title, not a person doing it.
- Responsible for developing and maintaining web applications
- Worked closely with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality software
- Passionate about writing clean, scalable code
Keywords an ATS looks for
Include the ones that are true of you. Our free ATS checker scores your résumé against a specific job posting and shows the full keyword report.
Software Engineer résumé questions
How long should a software engineer résumé be?
One page until roughly eight years of experience, two after. Length is not the signal — density is. If a second page exists it must carry work as strong as the first, otherwise it dilutes.
Should I list every language I have touched?
No. List what you would accept an interview question on. A parser matches keywords, but a human asks about them, and an unbacked keyword costs more in the room than it gains in the queue.
Do projects belong on a software engineer résumé?
Early on, yes — they are your evidence. Once you have three years of employed work, keep only projects that are genuinely used by someone other than you, and say by how many.