Software engineer resume templates built around the stack

What an engineering hiring manager is looking for

Roughly in order:

1. Can they do the job we are hiring for? Stack overlap, and how recent it is.
2. Have they shipped something that ran in production? Scale, traffic, uptime, data volume — anything that implies real constraints.
3. Did they make decisions or execute tickets? The difference between "worked on the payments service" and "moved payments off the monolith, cut p99 from 900ms to 210ms".
4. Can they write? The resume is the sample. Vague bullets read as vague thinking.

The templates handle the layout; that list is what the words have to do.

Which template

Software Engineer is the default. Tinted sidebar for languages, frameworks, tooling and certifications, wide main column for experience and projects. Everything has a place, which is the main thing.

Tech is a two-column variant that puts projects higher. Good early-career, when side projects are doing more work than employment history.

Terminal is the dark one — monospace, // section headings, a window chrome bar at the top. Sending it to an engineering team where a person reads it is a good signal. Sending it to a large-company HR portal is not, and it uses a lot of ink on paper.

Impact is worth considering if your titles and numbers are strong. Oversized role titles, heavy accent bars, summary in a tinted block.

QA Engineer has room for test tooling, frameworks and coverage detail, which a generic template makes awkward.

Startup puts projects before employment entirely. Right for founders, bootcamp graduates and anyone whose best work was not a job.

For plain-parse insurance, ATS Friendly and Chronological from the ATS collection are the safe pair.

Writing the skills section

The most common mistake is one undifferentiated list of thirty items, which forces the reader to guess what you are actually good at.

Group it and order it by strength:

Languages     Python, Go, TypeScript, SQL
Frameworks    Django, FastAPI, React, Next.js
Data          Postgres, Redis, Kafka, dbt, Snowflake
Infra         AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions

Four or five groups, five or six items each. Leave out anything you would not want to be interviewed on — a listed skill is an invitation. And drop the version numbers unless they matter (Python 3 is not a differentiator; Java 8 versus 21 sometimes is).

Writing the experience bullets

Structure that works: what you built, the constraint, the measured result.

Weak:

Worked on the payments service. Used Go and Kafka. Participated in code reviews.

Strong:

Extracted payments from the Rails monolith into a Go service handling 4k req/s, keeping a zero-downtime cutover across 11 regions. Cut p99 latency from 900ms to 210ms and dropped failed-charge retries 38%.

Same job. The second one shows scale, a real constraint, and two numbers. It is also harder to write, which is why most resumes do not.

If you genuinely cannot share numbers, give shape instead: "a service used by every internal team", "a migration across eleven regions", "a codebase of about 400k lines".

Projects, and how many

Two or three, with the same structure as a job entry: what it is, what it is built with, why it exists, what happened. A link if it is public.

Early career, projects can be your strongest section and should sit above education. Ten years in, one project is enough and only if it is genuinely interesting — a to-do app on a senior resume actively works against you.

More on phrasing in the action verbs guide and how to write a resume.