Engineering
Software Engineer CV: what employers ask for
Software engineer postings are broad, so screeners rely on specifics to tell candidates apart: which languages you shipped in, what the systems did, how big they were and what changed because of your work. A CV that lists technologies without tying them to outcomes reads the same as hundreds of others.
From real postings
We read 217 Software Engineer job postings from 78 companies on 6 November 2026. The most named asks were Python (93), Monitoring / observability (84) and Cross-functional work (77). 102 postings stated years of experience; the middle value was 5.
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What a strong Software Engineer CV looks like
Start here if you are editing a CV today. The evidence for each point follows below.
Section order, top to bottom
- HeaderName, email, phone, city, and one useful link such as a repository or a product you worked on.
- SummaryTwo or three lines: your title, years of experience, your main languages, and the kind of systems you build.
- ExperienceMost recent first. Three to five bullets per job: what you built, in what, how big it was, and what changed.
- SkillsGrouped by languages, frameworks, data, and infrastructure. Each important entry should also appear in a bullet.
- ProjectsOnly while your jobs do not yet show the work the posting wants.
- EducationDegree and year. Some postings named a degree, and many of those also accepted equivalent experience.
The summary
Name your languages and the systems you work on. Software engineer postings are broad, so the summary is where you tell the reader which kind of engineer you are.
Software engineer with five years of experience building backend services in Go and Python on AWS. I care about reliability and own my services in production, including on-call.
Skills: show them, do not just list them
Python was the most named language in our sample, followed by Go and Java. Cloud, distributed systems and Kubernetes also came up often, and so did large language models. Name the languages you have shipped in, inside bullets that say what the code did.
Weak and strong bullets
Illustrative rewrites, not real candidates. Use your own work, and only numbers you can back up.
Weak: Responsible for backend development.
Stronger: Built the order-history API in Go serving the mobile app, cutting p95 response time from 900 ms to 250 ms.
Why it works: The language, the consumer and a measured change. A reviewer can ask how you did it.
Weak: Used Docker and CI/CD.
Stronger: Containerised four services and moved them to a GitHub Actions pipeline, shortening releases from weekly to daily.
Why it works: Shows delivery work with a before and after, not just tool names.
Weak: Helped improve code quality.
Stronger: Introduced integration tests for the checkout flow, which caught two regressions before release in the first month.
Why it works: Testing with a concrete payoff. It proves the tests mattered.
What Software Engineer job postings ask for
Counted from 217 real postings, not guessed. When you paste a posting into Resymetry, it checks each of these asks against your CV and marks it as shown, only listed, or missing.
| Skill or ask | Postings naming it | Only as nice to have |
|---|---|---|
| Python | 93 of 217 | 4 |
| Monitoring / observability | 84 of 214 | 5 |
| Cross-functional work | 77 of 217 | 1 |
| Go | 67 of 217 | 1 |
| AWS | 63 of 217 | 3 |
| Java | 62 of 217 | 1 |
| Distributed systems | 59 of 217 | 3 |
| Stakeholder management | 55 of 217 | 2 |
| Kubernetes | 54 of 217 | 7 |
| TypeScript | 49 of 217 | 2 |
Show 8 more
| Skill or ask | Postings naming it | Only as nice to have |
|---|---|---|
| LLMs / generative AI | 46 of 217 | 7 |
| React | 46 of 217 | 7 |
| Machine learning | 44 of 217 | 9 |
| Metrics / KPIs | 44 of 217 | 3 |
| CI/CD | 42 of 217 | 5 |
| Docker | 38 of 217 | 7 |
| Roadmap | 38 of 217 | – |
| GCP | 35 of 217 | 3 |
How we counted
On 6 November 2026 we read 217 live Software Engineer postings from 78 companies, through their public job boards (Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby). A posting counted when its title matched the role. We took at most three per company, so no single employer sets the result.
A skill counts once per posting, when it is named outside the benefits and company boilerplate. Matching is by keyword, so read the numbers as “named in”, not “strictly required”. “Only as nice to have” means it appeared only under a heading such as “Nice to have” or “Bonus”. 113 of the 217 postings had such a heading, so that column is a floor.
By location on the posting: 121 US, 13 UK, 14 India, 69 elsewhere or remote. Most employers in the sample are technology companies, which skews the result towards their stacks.
Companies sampled: Affirm, Airbnb, Anduril, Asana, Ashby, Bloomreach, Brex, Carta, Carvana, Chime, Cloudflare, Cohere, Coinbase, Coursera, Cursor, Databricks, Datadog, Deliveroo, Discord, Dropbox, Druva, Duolingo, Elastic, ElevenLabs, Epic Games, Faire, Figma, Fivetran, Flexport, Gemini, GitLab, Graphcore, Gusto, HackerRank, Instacart, Intercom, Lucid Motors, Lyft, Mixpanel, MongoDB, Monzo, Mozilla, New Relic, Notion, Nuro, Okta, OpenAI, Oscar Health, Outreach, Perplexity, Pinterest, Ramp, Reddit, Redwood Materials, Relativity, Replit, Riot Games, Robinhood, Roblox, Samsara, Scale AI, SoFi, SpaceX, Spotify, Squarespace, Stripe, Supabase, Synthesia, Thoughtworks, Toast, Twilio, Twitch, Vanta, Vercel, Watershed, Wealthfront, Yext, Zscaler.
The script that produced these numbers is scripts/role-postings.mjs in the Resymetry repository. It stores counts only, never the text of a posting.
What employers look for in a Software Engineer CV
Screeners check these first. Each one should be visible in your job entries, not only in a skills list.
- Production experience in the languages the posting names, shown inside job entries rather than only in a skills list.
- Ownership of something end to end: a feature, a service or a migration you drove from design to release.
- Evidence of engineering quality, such as tests you wrote, code review, incident follow-ups or performance work.
- Scale and context: users served, request volume, data size or team size, so the reader can judge difficulty.
- Collaboration with product, design or other teams, described through what you delivered together.
4 common Software Engineer CV mistakes and how to fix them
A skills section with 30 technologies and job entries that never mention them.
Fix: Keep the skills list short and make sure every core language appears in at least one achievement.
Bullets that describe duties: "Worked on the payments service."
Fix: Say what you changed and what it did: the feature, the result and the scale.
No sign of how large or hard the work was.
Fix: Add one number per role where you honestly have one: users, requests, latency, cost or team size.
Side projects listed above paid experience for mid-level applications.
Fix: Lead with professional work. Keep projects for skills your jobs do not show.
Starting from scratch, or the layout is the problem rather than the content? There are free ATS CV templates to start from.
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Software Engineer CV questions
- How many programming languages should a software engineer CV list?
- List the ones you could be interviewed on, usually three to six. Each main language should also appear in a job entry that shows what you built with it.
- Should I include personal projects on a software engineer CV?
- Yes, when they show a skill your jobs do not, or when you have little professional experience. Describe them like work: what it does, what you used and any real usage.
- Do I need a separate CV for each software engineer application?
- You do not need a new CV, but adjust the summary and the order of bullets so the posting's main requirements are visible in the first third of the page.