You can take projects from idea through implementation and QA. You’ve been around the block as a senior software engineer.
Still, you may have questions about how to write a cover letter or what makes a good resume. How should I talk about the programming languages/ frameworks I know? How long should it be?
We’ve helped thousands of senior developers land great jobs. These five senior software engineer resume templates are the outcome of what we learned.
Why this resume works
- Just with a quick glance at your resume, recruiters should be convinced that you’re the gem they’ve been searching for. Capitalizing on compelling resume action verbs will do just that.
- To introduce your professional feats, make the most of power words (we’re talking “built”, “oversaw”, “developed” and “transformed”). These are your career highlights packing a punch, propelling your senior software engineer resume from good to “can’t-put-down.”
What Matters To Recruiters: Skills & Work Experience
Recruiters are looking to answer two questions when looking at your senior developer resume:
- Does your prior work experience convince them you can write good code?
- Do you have the right technical skills?
Let’s start with the second one first (because we’re feeling wild today). Your skills section will answer this one.
The goal is to include your top five to seven skills, ideally at least a few that are mentioned in the job description of the role you’re looking at.
9 Top Senior Software Engineer Skills
- Python
- Java
- HTML/ CSS
- Typescript
- JavaScript (Node)
- Unix
- Git
- Selenium
- AWS (Redshift)
Sample Senior Software Engineer Work Experience Bullet Points
Remember your goal with your work experience: to convince a recruiter that you can write good code.
“Good” code is obviously impossible to evaluate on a resume, so you should focus on the impact that your code had. Focus on the business outcome.
Did you improve the speed of the product? Fix a bug that increased customer conversion rate? Automated a process to save manual hours?
Here’s a basic formula:
[action you took] + [context/skills you used] + [outcome of action]
Here are some examples:
- Transformed UIs using React, decreasing debugging time by 62% and increasing views by 31%
- Built and maintained a full stack web-app using Node on the front-end and Django on the back-end that helped over 7,000 weekly users get citations for their research papers
- Built a back-end in Laravel to support over 10,000 products and variations for an e-commerce website and reduced page-load time by 11%
- Automated data collection for a web scraper using Selenium that reduced manual data entry by 88 hours per week.
Top 5 Tips for Your Senior Software Engineer Resume
- Programming languages to focus on
- When it comes to which programming languages to focus on, the key is expertise over generality. It’s much better to be a clear expert in one language than to be just okay in ten languages.
- Demonstrate project ownership
- You have the word “senior” in your title for a reason. Employers are looking to you for complete project ownership. They want you to be the expert they can rely on to deliver good, clean code.
- Front end, back end, both, or neither?
- It should be crystal clear from your resume what part of the tech stack you like to work on and what you have experience with. If a recruiter is left guessing, they’ll likely pass on giving you an interview.
- Give context to your technical skills
- Anyone can put a laundry list of programming languages, frameworks, and libraries on their resume (we’ve seen up to 60). Including these skills in the context they were used lends much more credibility to your expertise.
- Don’t include a career summary
- Most career summaries are generic and boring to read. Unless you’re going to use it to say something the rest of your resume doesn’t, it’s not worth the real estate it costs.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I format my senior software engineer resume?
- The guiding principle when formatting your resume is to make it readable. Make it look nice to read for another person. Ample spacing, big font, and an intuitive resume template will get you most of the way there.
- How long does it need to be?
- Try your best to keep it to one page. Your job is to make the life of the recruiter as easy as possible because happy people give more interviews. One-page resumes do that.
- Should I customize my resume for each job?
- Yes, but it’s easier than it sounds. Any technical skills mentioned in the job description that you have, put on your resume. Any projects that come to mind as you read the job description, put on your resume.
