Software Engineer Resume Template (Free to Copy)

Use a single-column, reverse-chronological layout on one page (two if you have 10+ years and the second page is worth reading). Put your name and links at the top, then skills, experience, projects, and education. Use one standard font, plain section headings, and no tables, icons, photos, or skill bars. Export it as a PDF. That is the whole template. The rest of this page is a copy-ready version of it, filled-in examples for new grad, mid-level, and senior engineers, and how to adapt it for your stack.

The same template works for a software developer resume and a software engineer resume. Companies use the two titles for the same work, so match whichever word the job posting uses in your summary and keep your real job titles as they were.

Why plain wins over designed: in Ladders' 2018 eye-tracking study of recruiters, as reported by HR Dive, the initial skim averaged 7.4 seconds, and resumes that did well had simple layouts with clear sections and headings. The ones that did poorly had multiple columns, little white space, and long sentences. A plain template gives your content the best shot in that first pass.

Copy this into Google Docs, Word, or a plain text file and replace the brackets. It is deliberately plain, so the formatting survives copying between editors and applicant tracking systems can read it in order.

FIRST LAST
City, ST | you@example.com | (555) 555-0100 | linkedin.com/in/yourname | github.com/yourname

SUMMARY  (optional, 2 lines max)
Backend software engineer with 4 years building Go and PostgreSQL services
for payments. Looking for platform or infrastructure roles.

SKILLS
Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript, SQL
Frameworks: gRPC, FastAPI, React
Cloud and infra: AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS), Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions
Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis

EXPERIENCE
Software Engineer, Company Name                         City, ST or Remote
Mon YYYY - Present
- [Verb] [what you built or changed] with [tech], [result with a number].
- [Verb] [problem you fixed], [how you fixed it], [what got better].
- [Verb] [something you owned end to end], [who used it or how many].
- [Optional: on-call, mentoring, migration, cost or reliability work.]

Previous Title, Previous Company                        City, ST
Mon YYYY - Mon YYYY
- [2 to 3 bullets. Older roles get fewer lines.]

PROJECTS  (move above Experience if you have under a year of work)
Project Name | Tech, Tech, Tech | github.com/you/project
- What it does, who uses it, one number (users, requests, stars, latency).
- The hardest technical problem in it and how you solved it.

EDUCATION
B.S. Computer Science, University Name                  Mon YYYY
GPA 3.7/4.0 (only if 3.5+) | Coursework: only for new grads

CERTIFICATIONS  (optional)
AWS Certified Developer - Associate, 2025

Once it is in your editor, make your name 16 to 20pt, make section headings bold or small caps, and right-align the dates with a tab stop (not spaces). Do not add more styling than that.

If you would rather start from a formatted file, the editor-specific guides have one each: Google Docs template, Word template, and Overleaf (LaTeX) template. Jake's Resume is the most common LaTeX version of this same layout. You can also paste your current resume into the SWE Resume builder, which outputs this format and rewrites weak bullets.

Header

Name, city and state (or "Remote"), email, phone, LinkedIn, and GitHub or a portfolio if it has work you would show in an interview. A full street address is unnecessary. Keep it in the body of the document instead of Word's header area; Tech Interview Handbook gives the same advice so applicant tracking systems can read it. More on links in how to list GitHub on a resume.

Summary (optional)

Two lines at most: your focus, years, and the kind of role you want. Skip it if it would say "motivated developer seeking opportunities." It earns its place for career changers, senior candidates, and anyone whose last title does not match the job. See should software engineers use a summary.

Skills

Group by category (Languages, Frameworks, Cloud and infra, Databases) on 2 to 4 lines. List what you could be interviewed on today, and put the ones the posting asks for first. Ratings, percentages, and soft skills do not belong here. For what to include by role, see software engineer resume skills.

Experience

Reverse chronological. Each role gets title, company, location, and dates on one or two lines, then 3 to 5 bullets for recent roles and 1 to 3 for older ones. A useful bullet says what you did, with what, and what changed:

• Weak: Responsible for backend development of the payments service.
• Better: Added idempotency keys to the Go payments API, which ended duplicate charges from client retries (about 40 a week before the fix).

If you do not have a hard metric, use scale (requests per second, users, rows, services), time saved, or what the work unblocked. The XYZ method and our bullet point examples go deeper.

Projects

For new grads and career changers, projects often carry as much weight as experience. After a few years of work they become optional. Two projects with real users, real constraints, or a hard technical problem beat five tutorial clones. Name the stack on the title line and link the repo. Examples in resume projects for software engineers.

Education and certifications

Degree, school, graduation date. Add GPA only if it is strong (3.5 and up is the usual cutoff) and coursework only if you are a new grad. Bootcamps go here too. Certifications such as AWS or Kubernetes are worth a line when the posting mentions them.

These are the same template filled in for three different candidates. The people and companies are made up; the structure and the kind of detail are what to copy. Notice how the section order and bullet style change as experience grows.

Entry level and new grad software developer

Education goes first, then the internship, then projects. Projects carry as much weight as the internship, so they get real bullets with numbers.

More at this level: new grad resume guide, entry-level software engineer resume example, and developer resume with no experience.

Mid-level software engineer (3 to 6 years)

Experience moves to the top and takes most of the page. Projects drop off unless they show something the jobs do not. Bullets shift from "built X" to ownership: migrations, cost, reliability, on-call.

Senior software engineer resume template (7+ years)

A two-line summary helps here because it sets your level and focus before the reader hits the bullets. The first bullets of the current role should show scope: team size, duration, traffic, and the decisions you made. Older roles shrink to two bullets. Education is one line with no date needed.

For senior and staff roles, the hard part is choosing what to leave out. The senior engineer resume guide and staff engineer resume guide cover how to show technical leadership without turning bullets into paragraphs. For a wider set of samples, see software engineer resume examples.

The layout stays the same across specialties. What changes is the skills line and what your best bullets are about.

If you apply to two kinds of roles, keep a separate copy for each. A frontend-leaning and a backend-leaning version of the same full stack experience usually reads better than a blend.

All four can produce the same clean PDF. Pick the one you will actually keep updated. Most resumes get worse through rushed edits the night before an application, and a tool you are comfortable in makes that less likely.

Unsure about columns or length? Can software engineers use two-column resumes, one-page tech resume, and ATS-friendly resume template each cover one of those decisions in detail.

• Two columns with skills in a sidebar. Text pulled from a two-column PDF often comes out interleaved, one line from each column. Try the paste test below on one and you will see it. The sidebar is also easy for a skimming reader to skip.
• Skill bars, star ratings, or percentages. "Python 80%" tells a reader nothing and parses as noise.
• Listing every technology you have touched. A 40-item skills block hides the 8 that match the job. If you could not answer interview questions on it, cut it.
• Bullets that describe the team's job. "Responsible for microservices" could be anyone on the team. Say what you changed.
• Inconsistent dates and formats. Mixing "Jan 2024" and "01/2024", or periods on some bullets and not others, reads as careless to the people who review code for a living.
• A photo, date of birth, or full address. Not expected on US tech resumes, and they take space from your work.
• A file called resume.pdf or Resume_FINAL_v3.pdf. Use First-Last-Resume.pdf.

If the layout is fine and you still get no replies, the problem is usually the bullets or the targeting. Common software engineer resume mistakes covers the content side.

Five minutes of checks after you export the PDF:

1. Open the PDF, select all, copy, and paste into a plain text editor. Your name, every section, and every bullet should come out in reading order with no missing or garbled characters. If they do not, an ATS will have the same problem.
2. Click every link. LinkedIn and GitHub URLs break more often than you would expect after editing.
3. Read only the first bullet of each role. Those are the lines a skimming recruiter is most likely to see, so they should be your strongest.
4. Compare your skills line with the job posting. The tools it names that you genuinely use should be visible near the top.
5. Check the page edge. If a single line spills onto page two, tighten it back to one page.

You can also run the PDF through the resume format checker or the ATS resume scanner, or upload it below to see which bullets to rewrite first.