Software Engineer Resume Keywords

Skills, tools and practices

How many of the 819 postings mention each term at least once. The last column shows the share among the 196 India-located postings.

Reading the table

• India-located postings (196) leaned towards Java (53% against 36% overall) and cloud (74% against 51%), and away from TypeScript (12% against 28%).
• The India-located postings come mostly from the India offices of large companies and from Indian startups on these job boards, so treat the split as a hint about this sample, not about the whole Indian market.
• Broad words such as "cloud", "security" and "scalability" are partly the employer describing its product. Name the specific service or technique you used instead.

Working-style words

Words such as "communication" appear in most ads for most roles. They show what employers say they value; on a resume they only count when a bullet shows them in action.

Example bullets that use these keywords

• Designed and shipped [n] REST APIs in Java and Spring Boot for [product area], serving [requests per day] at p95 latency under [x] ms.
• Moved [service] to Kubernetes on AWS with CI/CD in GitHub Actions; deploys went from [x] a week to [y] a day.
• Added tracing and alerts to [n] services, cutting time to detect incidents from [x] to [y] minutes.
• Built a Python data pipeline that [what it does], processing [volume] a day.
• Reviewed [n] pull requests a month and mentored [n] engineers through their first production releases.

Brackets mark numbers and details only you know. Fill them in from your own records, or leave the number out. Do not estimate.

How to use this list

1. Start from the job ad you are answering. This table shows what is common across many ads; the ad in front of you is what gets read.
2. Use a term only where it describes work you did, inside a bullet that shows how you used it. A list of skills on its own proves little.
3. Match the employer’s wording, for example "FP&A" or "financial planning and analysis", whichever the ad uses.
4. To compare your resume with one job description, use the job description match (free account, 2 credits). To see what a parser reads from your PDF first, run the free check.

Method

• On 12 October 2026 we collected 19,607 job postings from sources that publish them without a login (table below). After removing duplicates, 16,649 remained, of which 1,730 were India-located.
• Which postings count as software engineer roles: titles containing "software engineer", "software developer", "SDE", or backend/frontend/full-stack/platform/mobile engineer or developer; managers, directors and test-only roles excluded.
• An ad with the same employer, the same title and the same opening text is counted once, even when it is posted for several cities.
• At most 6 postings per employer per role, so one large employer cannot dominate. When an employer had more, India-located postings were kept first.
• On employer careers sites hosted on Workday we searched for the role name and read up to 8 matching postings per site and search, India-located first, so those postings are a targeted sample rather than everything the site lists.
• Sentences about pay, benefits, equal-opportunity law, privacy and the application process are removed before counting.
• A term counts once per posting if any of its listed spellings appears in the title or the remaining description (case-insensitive, whole words). The share is postings mentioning the term divided by N.
• 401 terms: the skills list used by Resumity's job search tool (minus spellings that are ordinary English words, such as "go", "rest" and "flow"), plus business, finance and HR terms added for this study. Terms outside the list are not counted.
• A term is not counted in postings from an employer whose name contains it (for example "MongoDB" in a MongoDB job ad).
• Terms are grouped into the role’s own skills, tools and practices, working-style words, and terms from other fields (for example "cloud" in a finance ad, usually the employer describing itself). The third group is left out of the tables.
• A posting counts as India-located if its location field names India or an Indian city.

Limits

• Most sources are remote-first job boards and the careers pages of US, European and Indian technology companies and banks, so the sample leans towards those employers and towards remote roles.
• Large Indian job boards such as Naukri and foundit, and LinkedIn, are not included. We used only sources that publish postings as open data without a login.
• The sample for this role is 819 postings from 261 employers, 196 of them India-located.
• A count shows how often a term appears in ads. It does not show how much a recruiter weighs it, or whether any software filters on it.
• This is one day’s snapshot. Ads change every week.
• Terms outside our list are not counted, so a skill missing from the table may still be common.

Related pages

Keyword counts for other roles