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Software EngineerSoftware Engineer CV example (2026)
A software engineer CV leads with a short summary naming your stack and seniority, then goes straight into experience — recruiters and hiring managers read bullets, not skill self-ratings. Keep a dedicated Skills section near the top or bottom so the ATS finds exact tool names, and put every technology you actually used inside the experience bullets too, where it has context. One page for under ~8 years of experience, two at most.
What recruiters scan for in a Software Engineer CV
- 1Named technologies in context — 'built X with React/PostgreSQL', not a bare skills cloud
- 2Scale and impact numbers: users, requests/sec, latency, cost saved
- 3Evidence of ownership: incidents handled, systems designed, code reviewed
- 4Career progression — growing scope from job to job
Example Software Engineer CV
A condensed but realistic example — note how every bullet pairs an action with a number, and how tools and methods are named exactly. Details are fictional.
Daniel Kowalski
Software Engineer · Backend & Cloud
Warsaw, PL · daniel.kowalski@email.com · github.com/dkowalski
Summary
Backend engineer with 6 years building high-traffic services in Python and Go. Led the payments-platform rewrite at a 40-person fintech; comfortable owning systems from design through on-call.
Experience
Senior Software Engineer
2023 – present
Finqo (fintech, Series B)
- Led rewrite of the payments service from a Django monolith to Go microservices, cutting p99 checkout latency from 2.1s to 380ms for 1.2M monthly transactions.
- Designed idempotent retry handling for card processing, reducing duplicate-charge incidents to zero over 18 months.
- Introduced CI/CD with GitHub Actions and trunk-based development; deploy frequency went from weekly to 8×/day.
- Mentored three mid-level engineers; two promoted within a year.
Software Engineer
2019 – 2023
Cloudpress
- Built REST and GraphQL APIs (Python/FastAPI, PostgreSQL) serving 300k daily active users.
- Cut AWS bill 22% by moving batch jobs to spot instances and right-sizing RDS.
- Owned on-call for the ingestion pipeline; wrote runbooks that halved mean time to recovery.
Skills
- Go
- Python (FastAPI, Django)
- PostgreSQL / Redis
- AWS (ECS, RDS, Lambda)
- Docker / Kubernetes
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
- Observability (Prometheus, Grafana)
Education
BSc Computer Science, Warsaw University of Technology, 2019
ATS keywords for Software Engineer roles
These terms appear most often in Software Engineer job descriptions and carry the most ATS score weight. Make sure the ones you can honestly claim appear in your CV — in the exact phrasing.
- 1CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI)
- 2Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- 3RESTful API design
- 4Agile / Scrum methodology
- 5Unit testing and TDD (Jest, pytest)
See how your Software Engineer CV scores
An example shows the target — the free ATS checker shows your distance from it: score, keyword gaps, and the fixes ranked by impact. And when you're applying to a specific job, the AI Adapt flow rewrites your CV against that exact posting — honestly, without inventing experience. $4 to download.
Software Engineer CV FAQ
How long should a software engineer CV be?
One page up to roughly 8 years of experience, two pages for senior/staff level. Recruiters spend under 10 seconds on the first pass — the second page only gets read if the first earns it.
Should I list every technology I've ever touched?
No. List the stack you can interview on today, and mirror the job description's exact names (e.g. 'React', not 'JS frameworks'). A skills section stuffed with 40 tools reads as noise to humans and dilutes keyword relevance for ATS ranking.
Do side projects belong on a software engineer CV?
Yes if you have under ~3 years of experience or the project is genuinely substantial (real users, open-source adoption). One or two lines with a link — never at the expense of work-experience bullets.
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