Senior Engineer Resume Guide
Transition from individual contributor to technical leader. Learn how to showcase system design, mentorship, and business impact on your resume.
Markus Fink
Senior Technical Recruiter, Ex - Google, Airbnb
What You'll Learn
The Senior Mindset Shift
Your resume needs to evolve as you grow. At senior+ levels, recruiters look for:
- Scope — Team-wide, org-wide, or company-wide impact
- Leadership — Technical decisions that influenced others
- Business outcomes — Revenue, cost savings, user growth
- Multiplier effect — How you made others more effective
Stop leading with implementation details. Lead with outcomes and scale.
Showing Technical Leadership
Leadership at senior levels isn't management—it's technical influence:
❌ Junior framing
"Built a caching layer using Redis."
✅ Senior framing
"Led architecture redesign of caching infrastructure, reducing infrastructure costs by $2M annually while improving p99 latency by 60%."
Use verbs like: Led, Architected, Drove, Spearheaded, Championed, Established
Quantifying Business Impact
Translate technical work to business outcomes:
- Revenue — "Increased checkout conversion by 15% ($10M ARR impact)"
- Cost reduction — "Optimized cloud spend by 40% ($500K annually)"
- Scale — "Scaled system from 1M to 50M daily active users"
- Time to market — "Reduced deploy time from 2 weeks to 2 hours"
If you don't know the business impact, ask. "How much revenue does this feature drive?" is a senior-level question.
System Design & Architecture
Demonstrate architectural thinking:
- Mention systems you designed, not just built
- Include scale indicators — requests/second, data volume, user count
- Reference trade-offs you made and their rationale
- Highlight cross-team dependencies you managed
Mentorship & Team Growth
Your multiplier effect matters at senior levels:
- Mentees — "Mentored 3 engineers to senior promotions"
- Hiring — "Conducted 50+ technical interviews, helped grow team from 5 to 15"
- Standards — "Established code review standards adopted across 100-person org"
- Documentation — "Created architecture decision records (ADRs) now used company-wide"
These aren't soft skills—they're evidence of senior engineering impact.
One Page or Two?
The conventional wisdom:
- One page — If you can fit your best work, always prefer one page
- Two pages — Acceptable for Staff+ with 10+ years of genuinely distinct experience
- Never three pages — If you need three, you're not being selective enough
The test: Does every line justify its space? If not, cut it. Senior engineers know how to prioritize—your resume should prove it.