Software Engineer Resume Example & Writing Tips for 2020

Software Engineer Resume Writing Advice

Let's cover the most important sections of a Software Engineer resume.

Resume Summary Section
Work Experience Section
Projects Section
Certifications Section
Technical Skills Section

How do you write a great Software Engineer resume?

A Software Engineer resume should demonstrate the ability to design and develop technical solutions that solves user problems. The resume should include specific examples of experiences working in a team to build and scale a software project. The candidate should have skills in software testing, designing technical architecture, and maintaining documentation of systems in both the front end and backend. Highlighting skills in programming languages and technical tools grabs the attention of recruiters.

Software Engineer Resume Summary Example

The resume summary or objective is the section that draws the most attention on your resume. It's where you need to prove in the fewest words possible that you're qualified to do the job, and you're up for the new challenge. It's important to tailor your resume summary to the job. Here's an example:

Experienced lead full-stack software engineer seeking a position at a mid-sized web product startup where I can apply my skills in developing, scaling, and maintaining web services in Google Cloud.

Read our guide on how to write the perfect resume summary to learn how to nail this section.

What work experiences should you include on your resume?

Here are some ideas on writing about your experiences and responsibilities as a Software Engineer on your resume depending on the level of experience you have.

Tip: Create a Strong Work Experience Section - It's important to include action verbs and quantify results. Use this list of over 350 resume action verbs as a guide to craft the most effective bullet points.

Junior level work experience for Software Engineer

Built software in ReactJS and NodeJS using Test Driven Development
Work in an agile software development team to complete various epics through sprints, working in conjunction with other developers and engineers from external companies.
Helped formulate and document software development best practices for the team by sharing example code changes from various development & product teams.
Made technology recommendations by staying up-to-date on new development and platforms, keeping an eye out for the right tool for the job, and taking the lead in setting up those tools.
Created documentation to help business users understand the purpose and definition of every database column in the system.

Senior level work experience for Software Engineer

Wrote modular, secure, and well-tested code in Python, React, and Go that's currently being used by millions of daily users.
Partnered with product managers, designers, and analysts to deeply understand the needs of users and build a file sharing product that serves those needs.
Led a team of engineers to build infrastructure to handle metadata for hundreds of billions of files, hundreds of petabytes of user data, and millions of concurrent connections.
Led tech debt initiatives to make software more extensible for new features.
Delivered improvements to our internal tooling and development environment to improve the time it takes to deliver software changes.
Worked closely with customer support to respond quickly to user issues, permanently solve them, and reduce the turnaround time of fixes.
Created a process for our team of software engineers to address bugs within the SLA and minimize the bug backlog.

Tip: List Licenses & Certifications Correctly - Make sure to list any licenses or certifications on your resume in the right section for the best chance to win the interview.

Software Engineer Resume Projects Section

This section is a great place to call out accomplishments and achievements in Projects on a Software Engineer resume. Below is an example of what this section could look like for a Legal Document File Sharing Web Product:

Designed, developed, and deployed a secure file sharing web application to Google Cloud currently in use by over 10 legal professionals.
Optimized for 0 downtime during deployments, autoscaling when processing a large number of documents, and caching files that are downloaded most frequently.
Improved test coverage by setting up an end-to-end and unit test framework to reduce the risk of breaking production after the addition of new engineers on the project.

Software Engineer Resume Certifications Section

Including Certifications on a Software Engineer resume can make your candidacy stand out. See how this Software Engineer resume example does that.

Developing Applications with Google Cloud Platform - Offered by Google Cloud, 2014
Python 3 Programming - University of Michigan, 2013

Relevant Software Engineer Technical Skills on a Resume

This resume section is a good opportunity to highlight specific skills relevant for a Software Engineer job. Be sure to review the job requirements and adjust your skills accordingly. Take a look at the example Software Engineer below.