Software Developer CV Examples & Writing Guide

A CV for a developer with about six years of experience, written the way engineering managers read: stack up top, then what each job shipped and at what scale. The name and companies are made up; the numbers are the kind you can pull from your own dashboards and pull request history.

Two people read a developer CV, and they read it differently. The recruiter matches words. The engineering manager judges scope. You have about 15 seconds with each.

• Stack match, right away. The recruiter scans for the languages and frameworks in the job advert. If the job says React, TypeScript and AWS and your first screen shows Angular and Azure, you are filtered out. Put the skills section near the top.
• Scope: how big was the thing you worked on? Users, requests per second, data volume, number of services, team size. "Built APIs" says nothing. "Built the ingestion API handling 2 million events a day" tells a manager what level you are.
• Evidence you shipped. A live product, an app store listing, or a GitHub profile with real commits. Managers click these. A GitHub link with three empty repos is worse than no link.
• Recency and trajectory. Are the strong bullets from 2025 or 2017? Did you move from developer to engineer II to senior, or change jobs every 9 months? Short stays need a one-word explanation (contract, acquisition, redundancy).

“I can tell in ten seconds whether someone has worked on a real production system. It is in the numbers: latency, uptime, users, on-call. CVs that only list technologies read like a bootcamp syllabus.”

The skills section on a developer CV is a lookup table, not a brag list. Group by category so a recruiter finds React in one second, and list only what you could be interviewed on today. Fourteen to twenty items is plenty.

• Write names the way the job advert writes them: "Node.js" not "NodeJS", "PostgreSQL" not "Postgres". ATS matching is often literal.
• Drop what you used once in 2018. Anything on the CV is fair game in an interview.
• No stars, bars or percentages. Managers ignore them and parsers cannot read them.
• Soft skills go in bullets as evidence, not in the skills list.

The pattern for a developer bullet: what you built or changed, the technology, and a number that shows the effect (speed, reliability, cost, adoption, team throughput). Seven rewrites from typical developer work:

With two or more years of professional experience, a projects section is optional and a GitHub link is only worth adding if the profile is active. For students, new graduates, bootcamp graduates and career changers, the projects section is the experience section. Treat it like one.

1. 1Pick two or three projects that work end to end and that you can demo. A deployed URL beats a repo.
2. 2Write each entry like a job: name, one-line description, the stack in parentheses, and two or three bullets with numbers (users, records, tests, load time, stars).
3. 3Make the repository presentable: a README with a screenshot and setup steps, a clean commit history, tests that run. Managers read the README first.
4. 4Pin those repos on your GitHub profile and archive abandoned tutorial clones.
5. 5For open-source work, link the merged pull request itself, not just the project.

Three lines: title and years, the stack and the kind of product, one result with a number. Skip the career objective unless you have no professional experience at all, and even then a profile like the first example works better.

Entry-level developer job adverts draw several hundred applications. The ones that get calls make a manager think "this person has already built things". You show that with projects, internships and any evidence of working in someone else's codebase.

• Page order: header with GitHub link, short profile, skills grouped by depth, then projects (two or three, with numbers) and internships. University graduates put education with the degree classification and graduation date right after the profile; bootcamp and self-taught developers put it near the bottom. Non-tech jobs go last, one or two lines each.
• Internships, placement years and software developer apprenticeships count as experience. Give the company type, the team, the stack and what you merged. "11 merged pull requests" is a number a manager trusts.
• Hackathons, coding competitions and lab demonstrator or teaching assistant roles belong on the page with results (placing, participants, students taught).
• Non-tech jobs show reliability: "Shift supervisor, coffee shop, 2022 to 2024: trained 6 new starters, handled closing cash-up." One or two lines.
• Leave out: a full list of GCSEs (one line is enough), every online course you ever started, a photo, a career objective about wanting to "grow and learn". One page, no exceptions.

At the senior and staff level the question shifts from "can you code" to "what did you own and who did you make better". The stack still matters, but it moves down the page.

• Lead with ownership: systems you designed or were technical owner for, with scale (traffic, revenue through the system, dependent teams).
• Show cross-team work: RFCs or design documents you wrote, migrations you led across teams, vendor decisions.
• Show people impact: engineers mentored, interview loops run, onboarding time cut.
• Include cost and reliability numbers: cloud spend reduced, uptime, incident rate, MTTR.
• Two pages are normal at senior level in the UK, but the current role should still fill half of page one. Collapse roles older than 10 years to one line each.

Most tech companies run applications through Greenhouse, Lever, Workday or Ashby, which parse the CV into fields first. Templates that look good on screen often parse badly, and your skills line ends up in the address field.

• One page for graduates and juniors; two pages are normal in the UK once you have several years of experience. Never more than two.
• Single column, standard font, no icons, skill bars or text boxes. Two-column templates are the most common cause of scrambled parsing.
• Standard section names: Experience, Projects, Skills, Education.
• Text-based PDF named Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf.
• Mirror the advert's wording once each: exact language and framework names, "REST", "microservices", "CI/CD", "unit testing", the cloud provider, "Agile" or "Scrum".
• No photo, no date of birth, no full street address (town or city is enough), and no need for "references available on request". In the US the same document is called a resume and the same rules apply.

Paste the job advert into the cvplex ATS checker with your CV. It shows which stack words from the job advert are missing, whether your skills section parsed as one, and which bullets lack a number.