Backend Engineer Resume Guide
Showcase your expertise in APIs, databases, and distributed systems. Learn how to present backend skills that hiring managers are looking for.
Markus Fink
Senior Technical Recruiter, Ex - Google, Airbnb
What You'll Learn
What Backend Hiring Managers Want
Backend roles focus on different signals than full-stack:
- API design — RESTful, GraphQL, gRPC experience
- Database expertise — Schema design, query optimization, scaling
- System design — Microservices, event-driven, caching strategies
- Scale indicators — RPS, latency percentiles, data volumes
- Reliability — Uptime SLAs, on-call experience, incident response
Technical Skills to Highlight
Your skills section should include:
Languages
Python, Java, Go, Node.js, Rust — focus on 2-3 you're strongest in
Databases
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, Cassandra
Infrastructure
AWS/GCP/Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform
Patterns
REST, GraphQL, gRPC, Event sourcing, CQRS, Microservices
Demonstrating Scale
Backend roles are judged heavily on scale:
- Requests — "Handled 50K RPS with p99 latency under 50ms"
- Data — "Processed 10TB of daily event data"
- Users — "Served 5M daily active users"
- Uptime — "Maintained 99.99% availability"
Bullet Point Examples
✅ Strong
"Designed and implemented RESTful API serving 100K requests/minute, reducing average response time from 200ms to 45ms through query optimization and Redis caching."
✅ Strong
"Led migration from monolith to microservices architecture, improving deployment frequency from monthly to daily while maintaining 99.9% uptime."
✅ Strong
"Built event-driven data pipeline processing 50M events/day using Kafka and Spark, enabling real-time analytics for 200-person product team."