Sample resume · fictional candidate
Software Engineer Resume Example
A complete one-page resume for a backend-leaning software engineer with four years of experience. Skills come first, then two jobs, then projects that show something the jobs do not. The notes beside each section explain the choices.
The sample, with notes
Rohan Mehta
Software Engineer, Backend and APIs
Pune, India · rohan.mehta@example.com · github.com/your-handle
Summary
Backend software engineer with 4 years of experience building Java and Go services for a payments product. Owns services from design review to on-call. Most recent work: moving settlement jobs off a shared database and cutting p95 latency on the merchant dashboard API.
Technical skills
- Languages: Java, Go, SQL, Python (scripting)
- Backend: Spring Boot, gRPC, REST APIs, Kafka, Redis
- Data: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch
- Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, RDS, SQS), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions
- Practices: Design docs, code review, on-call, unit and integration testing
Experience
Software Engineer II
Jul 2023 – PresentPayments company (fintech, about 600 employees) · Pune
- Split the settlement batch job out of the shared monolith database into a Go service with its own PostgreSQL schema; the nightly run fell from about 3 hours to 40 minutes.
- Cut p95 latency of the merchant dashboard API from 1.8 s to 450 ms by adding a Redis read cache and removing N+1 queries found through tracing.
- Wrote the design doc for idempotency keys on the refund API after a duplicate-refund incident, led the review, and shipped it; no duplicate refunds in the two quarters since.
- Share a weekly on-call rotation for 6 services; wrote 9 runbooks and tuned 14 noisy alerts so fewer pages needed no action.
- Review about 15 pull requests a week and mentored two new graduates through their first production releases.
Software Engineer
Aug 2021 – Jun 2023B2B SaaS startup (HR software, about 80 employees) · Bengaluru
- Built REST endpoints in Java (Spring Boot) for the leave and attendance module used by roughly 300 client companies.
- Wrote the CSV bulk-import service that replaced manual onboarding by support; setting up a new client went from 2 days to under 2 hours.
- Raised unit-test coverage of the payroll module from 35% to 70% before a major refactor; the new tests caught 11 regressions in review.
- Moved CI from a self-hosted Jenkins server to GitHub Actions with cached Docker layers; average pipeline time dropped from 22 to 9 minutes.
Projects
- Open source: Contributed a sliding-window strategy with benchmarks to a small open-source Go rate-limiting library; merged after two review rounds.
- Side project: Expense-splitting API in Go and PostgreSQL with property-based tests, deployed on a free cloud tier and used by about 20 friends.
Education
- B.E., Computer Engineering · Pune · 2021 · CGPA 8.1/10
Where the numbers in a resume like this come from
The figures above are made up, but each is a kind of number you can look up. Before you put one on your resume, find it in one of these places. If you cannot, describe the scope instead.
| Number | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| Latency (p50, p95, p99) | Your tracing or monitoring tool. Compare a week before and a week after the change. |
| Run time and pipeline time | CI history or the job scheduler logs. |
| Incidents, pages and alerts | Your paging tool history or the incident tracker. |
| Usage (requests, client companies, users) | API gateway metrics or product analytics. Round down and write "about". |
Adapting this example
- Frontend-leaning? Replace the latency bullet with a Core Web Vitals or bundle-size change you measured in Lighthouse or real-user monitoring.
- Fresher or campus placement: put Projects above Experience, add internships, and list CGPA and core coursework (data structures, DBMS, operating systems, networks).
- No numbers for a piece of work? Describe scope instead, for example "one of three engineers on the payouts service".
- Stay on one page until about 7 years of experience, in a single-column layout so the reading order stays predictable.