Free Resume Examples

Software Engineer Resume Examples & ATS Keywords

What ATS software and recruiters look for on a software engineer resume: the exact keywords to include, the mistakes that get resumes rejected, and a real bullet-point rewrite.

Keywords ATS software scans for

Include the ones that genuinely match your background, don't keyword-stuff.

JavaScriptTypeScriptReactNode.jsREST APIsCI/CDunit testingsystem designcloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP)Gitagile/scrumcode review

Common Software Engineer resume mistakes

  • Listing every language or framework ever touched instead of the 5-8 that match the job description.

  • Describing responsibilities ("worked on backend services") instead of impact: latency, uptime, scale, cost.

  • No mention of team size, codebase scale, or user-facing impact, which makes seniority impossible to judge.

  • Missing evidence of ownership: shipped features, on-call rotation, mentoring, or architecture decisions.

Weak vs. strong bullet example

Weak

Worked on backend features using Node.js and improved the API.

Strong

Redesigned the checkout API's database queries and added Redis caching, cutting p95 latency from 800ms to 140ms and reducing timeout-related support tickets by 90%.

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