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Sample ATS-friendly CV: Software Engineer

Pick a role and we'll show you what a strong, ATS-friendly CV for it looks like: the skills, projects and keywords recruiters look for. Use it as a template, then come back and check yours for free.

[Your Name]

Software Engineer · Backend & APIs

[City] · [email@example.com] · [Phone] · [linkedin.com/in/yourname]

Summary

Software engineer with 4 years building and running production web services. Comfortable owning a feature from design to on-call, with a focus on clean APIs, automated tests and fast, safe releases.

Skills

Java / Spring Boot · TypeScript / Node.js · REST & GraphQL APIs · PostgreSQL · Docker · CI/CD (GitHub Actions) · Unit & integration testing · Git & code review

Experience

Software Engineer2023 – Present

[Company], [City]

Designed and shipped a payments API handling 1.2M requests a day with 99.95% uptime.
Cut average page load time by 38% by adding caching and fixing slow database queries.
Raised test coverage from 45% to 80% and set up automated checks on every pull request.

Associate Software Engineer2021 – 2023

[Company], [City]

Built 12 features for an internal order-management tool used by 300 staff.
Fixed 90+ production bugs and wrote runbooks that halved repeat incidents.

Projects

Open-source rate limiter library

TypeScript, Redis, Jest

Built a token-bucket rate limiter used by 3 internal services; 600+ GitHub stars.
Wrote benchmarks and docs; handles 50k checks a second on one node.

Event-driven order pipeline

Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, Docker

Replaced a nightly batch job with Kafka events, cutting order sync delay from 24 hours to 2 seconds.

Education

B.Tech, Computer Science — [University], 2021

Certifications

AWS Certified Developer – Associate
Oracle Certified Professional: Java SE

Keywords recruiters search for

Use the ones that are true for you, in the same words.

Java
Spring Boot
Node.js
TypeScript
REST API
Microservices
SQL
Docker
CI/CD
Unit testing
Git
Agile

What each section is for

Summary: Three lines: role title, years of experience, and the two or three strengths the job ad asks for.
Skills: Use the exact wording from job ads ("Power BI", not "BI tools"). ATS filters match words, not meaning.
Experience: Most recent first. Each bullet: action verb, what you did, and a number that shows the result.
Projects: Show the tools you used and the outcome. This is where freshers and career-changers prove their skills.
Education: Degree, subject, institution, year. Keep it to one line once you have work experience.
Certifications: List the full official name so it matches what recruiters search for.

ATS formatting checklist

One column, no tables, text boxes, images or icons
Standard headings: Summary, Skills, Experience, Projects, Education
A plain font (Arial, Calibri) at 10–12 pt
Dates in one format, e.g. 2022 – Present
Contact details in the body, not the page header
Save as a text-based PDF or Word file, never a scanned image
Tailor the keywords to each job you apply for

This is an example. Replace everything in [brackets] and every number with your own, true details.

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Sample ATS-friendly CV: Software Engineer

Pick a role and we'll show you what a strong, ATS-friendly CV for it looks like: the skills, projects and keywords recruiters look for. Use it as a template, then come back and check yours for free.