Software Engineer Resume Example
A complete, ready-to-render software engineer resume in YAML. Copy it, replace the content, generate a PDF.
A good software engineer resume does three things: leads with measurable impact, organizes skills by category, and formats cleanly for both ATS parsers and human readers.
Here's a complete RenderCV input file that does all three. It's a real, working YAML file. Copy it, swap in your own content, and render.
Complete YAML example
cv:
name: Alex Rivera
location: Seattle, WA
email: alex.rivera@email.com
phone: "+12065550142"
website: https://alexrivera.dev
social_networks:
- network: LinkedIn
username: alexrivera
- network: GitHub
username: arivera-dev
sections:
summary:
- Backend engineer with 6 years of experience building
distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
Focused on reliability, developer tooling, and
measurable performance improvements.
experience:
- company: Stripe
position: Senior Software Engineer
location: Seattle, WA
start_date: 2023-01
end_date: present
highlights:
- Redesigned the payment settlement pipeline from batch
to event-driven architecture using Kafka and Go,
reducing end-to-end latency by 40%.
- Led a team of 4 engineers to build a fraud detection
service processing 12M transactions/day with 99.97%
uptime.
- Implemented a feature flag system with configuration-as-code,
cutting deployment rollback time from 15 minutes to
under 30 seconds.
- company: Datadog
position: Software Engineer II
location: New York, NY
start_date: 2020-06
end_date: 2022-12
highlights:
- Built a real-time log aggregation pipeline processing
2TB/day using Python and Apache Kafka on Kubernetes.
- Migrated CI/CD from Jenkins to GitHub Actions across
14 repositories, reducing average build time by 60%.
- Designed a distributed rate limiter using Redis that
handled 500K requests/second with sub-millisecond
overhead.
- company: IBM
position: Software Engineer
location: Austin, TX
start_date: 2019-01
end_date: 2020-05
highlights:
- Developed REST APIs in Java Spring Boot serving 3M
requests/day for the Watson Assistant platform.
- Reduced container image sizes by 45% through multi-stage
Docker builds, cutting deployment time across 200+ pods.
projects:
- name: kv-store
date: 2024-03
highlights:
- Built a distributed key-value store in Go with Raft
consensus, supporting linearizable reads and automatic
leader election across 5-node clusters.
- "[github.com/arivera-dev/kv-store](https://github.com/arivera-dev/kv-store)"
- name: loadtest-cli
date: 2023-08
highlights:
- HTTP load testing CLI in Rust with configurable
concurrency, percentile latency reporting, and JSON
output. 400+ GitHub stars.
- "[github.com/arivera-dev/loadtest-cli](https://github.com/arivera-dev/loadtest-cli)"
education:
- institution: University of Washington
area: Computer Science
degree: BS
start_date: 2015-09
end_date: 2019-05
highlights:
- "GPA: 3.8/4.0"
- "Relevant coursework: Distributed Systems, Operating
Systems, Database Internals, Computer Networks"
skills:
- label: Languages
details: Go, Python, Java, Rust, TypeScript, SQL
- label: Infrastructure
details: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS (ECS, Lambda,
S3, DynamoDB), GCP
- label: Data & Messaging
details: PostgreSQL, Redis, Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch
- label: Tools
details: Git, GitHub Actions, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana
design:
theme: engineeringresumes
This validates against RenderCV's JSON Schema. Every date is parsed and formatted consistently, every section follows a defined structure, and the output is a single-column PDF that ATS systems handle without issues.
bold_keywords: highlight your tech stack automatically
When you tailor your resume for a specific role, bold_keywords lets you emphasize technologies without editing individual bullets:
settings:
bold_keywords:
- Go
- Python
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- AWS
- Redis
- distributed systems
- CI/CD
- GitHub Actions
Every occurrence of these terms gets automatically bolded in the PDF. Recruiters scanning your resume see the relevant stack immediately. ATS parsers still see clean, parseable text underneath.
The practical benefit: a backend role might bold Go, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. A platform engineering role shifts to Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD. You change one list and regenerate. The bullets stay the same.
What makes each section work
Experience
Every bullet follows: action, technical context, measurable result. "Redesigned the payment settlement pipeline from batch to event-driven architecture using Kafka and Go, reducing end-to-end latency by 40%." That tells the reader what you did, how, and why it mattered. One sentence.
Avoid vague lines like "Worked on backend systems" or "Helped improve performance." Hiring managers at engineering companies expect specifics.
Projects
Personal and open-source projects are valuable for early-career engineers and for anyone showing skills outside their day job. Each entry here links to source code and describes what it does with concrete numbers.
Skills
Grouped by category: Languages, Infrastructure, Data, Tools. Clearer than a flat list, and it mirrors how job descriptions organize their requirements. Both human-scannable and ATS-parseable.
Education
Below experience and projects for anyone with a few years of work history. The example includes GPA and coursework, which is useful for recent grads. Senior engineers can trim this to institution, degree, and dates.
Picking a theme
For software engineering resumes, two themes are purpose-built:
- Engineeringresumes: dense, single-column, based on the format recommended by r/EngineeringResumes. Maximizes content per page.
- Engineeringclassic: a bit more whitespace, better for senior roles where readability matters more than density.
Classic, Sb2nov, and Moderncv work for general-purpose and academic use. Switching themes means changing one line of YAML.