How Daniel’s resume is built
Layout and order
Daniel Reyes is a fictional backend engineer written for the US, so the page is US Letter with month-and-year dates and no personal details. Plain fits two jobs, a degree and three skill groups on one page. With five years of work, Experience comes before Education; the degree is a single line.
How the bullets are built
Strong engineering bullets name the system, the change and the measurement. "Rebuilt the invoice service in Go; p95 latency fell from 480 ms to 90 ms at 2,000 requests a second" gives all three, plus the load, so the latency number means something. The Kafka bullet counts what was removed (14 nightly batch scripts) rather than claiming a vague improvement. The runbook bullet shows on-call ownership with a recovery time. The older job has two bullets: the API's users (120 clinics) and the contract tests that caught 30+ breaking changes.
Skills
Group skills by kind: languages, infrastructure, practices. List only what you could be interviewed on today.
Words to use
This page is about layout and bullets. For the skills, tools and verbs that recur in job posts, see the software engineer resume keywords.
Software engineer resume questions
Should I list every language I have used?
List the ones you would be happy to code in during an interview. Daniel lists four languages, and each one appears in a bullet too.
Do I need a GitHub link?
It helps if the profile has work you are glad to show. A link to an empty profile does more harm than leaving it off.
When should a software engineer move to two pages?
Around ten years or when you have staff-level scope to describe. Before that, cut older bullets until the page fits. If Plain feels cramped, Ledger gives each role more room.