INDUSTRY STATS
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, IT and Software Engineering positions are at a much faster than average growth rate, which is 22%. With that said, there are currently 1,847,900 jobs in the market right now. The total number of jobs is expected to increase by 409,500 to 2,257,400 in the period of 2020-30.
What’s more, the median annual wage for the IT and Software Engineering jobs was $110,140 in May 2020. The lowest 10% earned less than $65,210, and the highest 10% more than $170,100.
Our conclusion? The IT and Software Engineering job market is facing competition due to decreasing demand.
Top software development engineer sections that make the best resume
- Header
- Professional summary
- Experience (with numbers and results)
- Relevant skills
- Education
- Certifications
What to write in your software development engineer experience section
Perfecting your software development engineer resume experience section:
- Focus on results, not responsibilities;
- Use 4-6 bullet points per position;
- List only positions that are relevant to what you’re applying for;
- Include at least some form of quantitative data – it can be linked to the number of people you’ve managed or the - percentage decrease in costs that’s followed from your work - you decide;
- Choose action verbs over buzzwords.
We’ve collected some of the top resume experience sections from real Enhancv users. Check them out when drafting your own Software Development Engineer resume!
- Implemented new Back-end features/APIs in post-operational data cleanup module using Java, SpringBoot with complete ownership of the Microservice.
- Identifying data integrity issues, like invalid/fraud or duplicate data, and fixing them according to the requirements.
- Creating transparency in the to be billed data for audit purpose/future reference.
- Resulted in reduction of 80% of manual data cleanup tasks using automated rules and data manipulation, hence simplifying the procedure of billing.
- Implemented new/modified Back-end/Front-end functionalities using Java,Spring JPA, Coral APIs, Unit Testing, Amazon Web Services, Ruby on Rails
- Delivered quality code resulting in better user-experience and achieved better UI standards.
- Addressed customer needs at time of on-calls, building stronger connections
- Restructured back-end APIs integrating with front-end code resulting in better and faster website experience.
- Led development and growth of A10.com @Spil Games
- Integrate internally-developed micro-services, as well as marketplace 3rd party modules into our projects
- The application is used by more than 3 000 shopify businesses and generates a lot of monthly revenue
- Working unattended directly under CTO, in a pair of 2
- Setup automated tests ensuring 95% + coverage for the CRM
- Successfully led development of $500K research project which was deemed a "gold standard" by the client.
- Performed Web Scraping over a catalog of 100K+ school supply products using mainly NodeJS and MongoDB
- Leading team SDET development efforts by building up platforms and Build-Test execution environments for Windows and MacOS.
- Delivered high quality design & code for existing Python Tools, APIs and Automated tests, reduced ETA for source code acceptance.
- Deploy, enable & execute BVT, BAT, API-level and GUI automation code Test suite for various components of AWS Lumberyard application.
- Active Code reviews and project status reporting to team and Senior Management in Agile Scrum setting.
- Interview, help transition new engineers, and establish Development, Automation and Bug triage processes for them.
- Achieved high visibility with the Director of Development as well as QA teams through major milestones and gathered accolades from Software Dev. & Senior Managers, for robust delivery of work.
- Design and implementation of housing.com to makaan.com sellers' visibility combo products' auto sync processing flow using Java, Spring, Hibernate, Micro services, AWS SQS, RabbitMQ.
- Planning and fixing of stalling data warehousing ETL implemented in Apache Spark using driver/executor memory tuning and java garbage collection policy optimization. ETL execution time of site page views reduced to within 40 minutes for single day page views.
- Enhanced bulk image upload throughput from 35rpm to 200rpm by integrating AWS Lambda for image processing, watermarking and image hash computations for 3rd party partner seller companies' bulk image upload use cases.
- Design, development and implementation of makaan.com ad-products micro service - jean. Involvement in high-level and low-level design along with involvement with dev-ops in setting up of AWS instances, Nginx pointing and setting up logging on New-relic.
- Rest Api development for product roadmap requirements in existing flows. Java, Spring, Hibernate
- Makan.com image service complete maintenance and further development ownership including code and infra related issues.
- Developed in house framework for real time/high frequency extraction of real estate competitors' listing/seller data extraction pipeline.
- Web crawler implementation - Python crawling framework Scrapy.
- Data ETL implementation - Java, Apache Spark.
- Data warehousing implementation in non-relational, aggregate schema - Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift/PostgreSQL.
- Developed very first, and subsequent releases of Microsoft's online global store in 17 languages.
- Integral development and creative element of the team that developed tools exclusively for the Microsoft Signature line of laptops sold in the new Microsoft Stores. Tasked with writing a custom version of Microsoft Windows [C#] that would be branded "Microsoft Signature". That did not wotrk put tpoo well.
- Developed the very first Universal Windows App, together with its companion Microsoft Phone App. These packages could only be found at the newly minted Microsoft Store [using rebel tools such as JavaScript, paired with TDD, Xtreme programming, Agile/SCRUM methodologies and GIT source code repositories - unheard of at MSFT in those days].
- Invited member of competitive exploration team to prototype Kinect software for the measurement of display traffic in Microsoft Stores.
- Leading effort to automate partner onboarding process, reducing developer touch by 80% - saving an average of 3-4 months of developer time per partner.
- Representing EPS through company-wide re-platforming effort to ensure all partner needs are considered and any identified gaps are covered.
- Work side by side with Product and UX to discover and test new areas of interest for our partners - includes working through 1-2 week design sprints and heavy A/B testing.
- Leading two teams through designing, creating, maintaining, and testing applications and solutions to support all partner needs.
- Managed front-end UI team migration from multiple tech stacks into one PWA platform.
- Dedicated to onboarding Chase and Bank of America into the Expedia platforms, including working directly with the clients and handling any front-end concerns needing to be managed.
- Supported key partner accounts such as Chase, TD Ameritrade CA, Bank of America, and Royal Bank of Canada providing timely feature enhancements on their hosted travel sites.
- Building POC for our clients.
- Contribute to Adding new features, and maintaining Supahands platforms.
- Contribute to planning for new features in terms of architecture, and technology.
- Mentor Juniors developers in terms of assigning tasks, code reviews, 1 on 1 session, and pair programming sessions.
- Led the re-architecture of data loss prevention feature in Microsoft Office 365 cloud ecosystem - Estimated $1B savings from efficient detection of sensitive content in new scalable microservices architecture. - 10x improvement in latency and accuracy in detecting sensitive data for 200 Million cloud users. - 99.99% feature availability achieved in service WW.
- Led the design and development of sensitive data detection feature in Microsoft Teams (communication platform) - Near real-time detection of sensitive content in user chat messages for 1M customers. - Featured in Microsoft Q3 product highlight in 2019.
- Led the design and development of sensitive data detection feature in large-scale customer data stores - Pioneered technique to detect sensitive content within large-scale on-premise customer data stores.
- Design and implementation of large localized sensitive content dictionaries within Microsoft Office 365 environment - Pioneered ability to search sensitive content in 1M cloud users' documents for pre-specified language+word combination.
- Full-stack development of V1 management portal for Office 365 data loss prevention feature - Ground-breaking user-friendly management experience for Office 365 cloud customers.
- Full-stack development of mobile device management portal for Office 356 mobile cloud customers - Led to the acquisition of 35M new customer licenses for compliance features.
- Architect for cloud based web security features that include internal and customer facing applications used for the automated deployment and management of TLS certificates.
- Drove ideation and execution of next generation Certificate Management System, which solves for 70% of direct customer use case, reducing the average E2E fulfilment turnaround time from 5 days to 2 hours.
- Leading a team responsible for the framework for delivering Terraform/Ansible Plug-ins, CLI, and SDK for all products and services across EdgeCast.
- Leading build out of team software guidelines, standards, processes and procedures.
- Driving technical excellence as a Strategic Partner Advisor across company-wide OKRs driving development velocity and increasing platform resilience and availability.
- Develop Open-Source solution (M-Kit) which helps to integrate Monotype Technologies in the Open-Source Environment.
- Mentor Software Developers to deliver Sprint Commitments.
- Document the features consistently throughout the development process by creating feature design (LDD, HDD, class diagrams, UML) documents, Specification documents, API reference, and release notes.
- Fix the bugs and customized the code as per customer request.
- I was Leading the Automation charter for the Sodexo Business Unit which contains a team of 4 SDET along with 6 Sr. QAs.
- Designed, Developed and Implemented the Automated testing framework for backend API, Web-UI and Mobile Application.
- Set Up the CI-CD job for all our backend and front end regression suite.
- Attending walkthrough, involved in analyzing business requirements, understanding the scope, attending product brainstorming sessions and prioritizing accordingly.
- Involved in risk and impact analysis, effort estimations, test plans, documentations and executions, RCAs and defect triage, timely high- quality deliverable.
- Mentoring peers and new members of the team to adapt the QA best practices and automation testing practices.
- Contributed towards the successful launch of OLA in UK and alone handled the effort from BPD side.
- Worked a lot towards the re-engineering and migration of all BPD related stuff to new Pricing platform.
- Enhanced the Automation testing Framework to test the integration of new Pricing platform to the existing system.
- Involved in the Enhancement and maintenance of the UIAutomation framework and have written Page classes POM classes), Test classes and developed many generic methods.
- Reviewing the automation test scripts and the test data for automation.
- Involved in Automation of Functional, Regression, Integration and System Test Cases.
- Project Mobile Architect and iOS Frontend Development.
- Frontend Angular and iOS developer, web real time communication (RTC) strategy for medical and professional risks online Consulting
- I developed and started up the first continuos integration strategy for mobile department using Jenkins CI
- Lead Mobile and Web developer for new online transactions system at local mayoralty
- New website for international corporation Bellota using Javascript, Html5, CSS3 and backend developer based on Asp.net Mvc
- Software developer on top Colombian pension insurance Colpensiones website
PRO TIP
In writing your Software Development Engineer resume, you will no doubt want to list your previous duties - as you should. But steer clear of just listing your duties, instead of your achievements. Make your resume stand out by communicating what you have done, and not merely what the job needed you to do.
Action verbs for your software development engineer resume
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Software development engineer resume skills section to impress recruiters
Checklist for a perfect Software Development Engineer resume skills section:
- Make sure to include most if not all essential skills for the job;
- Check the job description and add some keywords to pass ATS;
- List both hard and technical skills;
- When it comes to soft skills – elaborate on them in other sections of your resume (e.g. the experience section).
Top skills for your software development engineer resume
Python
Java
Javascript
GIT
SQL
HTML
Teamwork and communication
Creative problem solving
Analystical thinking
Owning up to errors
Self-learning
Time management
PRO TIP
When picking skills to feature in your resume, make sure they'll be relevant to the position you’re applying to. The point of listing skills is for you to stand out from the competition. Stay away from repetitive, meaningless skills that everyone uses in their resumes. Or else, they’ll backfire and make you look like an average candidate.
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Software development engineer resume header: tips, red flags, and best practices
Checklist for your software development engineer resume header
- Your name and surname in a legible and larger resume font
- The job title you’re applying for or your current job title as a subheading to your name
- Link to your portfolio or online profile, such as LinkedIn
- Address (City and State for the US; just your city for rest of the world)
- Email address
- Headshot (required or welcomed in the EU; not required and sometimes frowned upon in the US)
Stick to popular email providers such as Gmail or Outlook. And use these professional formats to create your username:
- first.last@gmail.com
- last.first@gmail.com
- firstlast@gmail.com
- f.last@gmail.com
- first.l@gmail.com
RECOMMENDED READS:
PRO TIP
Some companies, states, and countries have non-discrimination policies about what kind of information can be included on your Software Development Engineer resume. This might include a photo (which is often included in a resume header and might be on personal web pages you link to). You can always email the company’s HR department to ask about their policies before you apply.
Writing an effective software development engineer resume summary
Impressive software development engineer resume summary checklist:
- Point out the achievements that make you a valuable applicant;
- Mention the total years of experience you have;
- Highlight the things you believe make you the best fit for the position;
- Keep it short: aim at having no more than 3-5 sentences.
Resume summary formula:
PRO TIP
When writing a resume summary or objective, avoid first-person narrative.
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Drawing the attention to your software development engineer resume education section
Crafting a job-winning education section:
- Use the reverse-chronological format when listing your degrees;
- Tailor the classes you’ve taken to the position you’re applying for if you’re an entry-level candidate;
- Mention the awards and honors you’ve received;
- Add your certifications (but only those relevant to the position).
Top certifications for your software development engineer resume

Project Development Using JAVA for Beginners - 2022
Learn Java from scratch and become Software Engineer.

Get Hired Web Development, Software Development Certificate
Computer Science, Computer Engineer; Know Your Options And Requirements For Career Success With Computer Science Degree

Software Development From A to Z - OOP, UML, Agile, Python
Learn about software development, OOP, UML, Agile, SCRUM, Python. Get insights into the software development industry.

The Ultimate Hands-On Lightning Web Component
The most complete Salesforce LWC Development course brought to you by a Google Software Engineer.

SDLC Overview (1 Hour) - Software Development Life Cycle
First step into the Software World of Terms and acronyms.
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PRO TIP
There are dozens of certifications that you can claim as a Software Development Engineer. But, some are more effective than others. That’s why you mustn’t include every certificate other applicants might have. Try instead to earn and list a few of the difficult ones.
Choosing the best format for your software development engineer resume
The content of your Software Development Engineer resume is what will get you hired, right?
But even when your content’s amazing and you’re a true over-achiever, recruiters might not think you’re a good fit if your resume looks messy or is not formatted the right way.
In general, there are three basic resume formats we advise you to stick with:
- Reverse-chronological resume format;
- Functional skills-based resume format;
- Combination (or Hybrid) resume format.
Deciding which one to use depends on your experience, the industry, and the company. In short — you need to know what your applicant profile is.
For instance, reverse-chronological resumes are great for people with over 10 years of experience and no employment gaps. Here, you need to list all your relevant experience in a reverse-chronological format, starting from the most recent and going back to less recent positions.
Functional skills-based resumes, on the other hand, are great for entry-level applicants, graduate students, or people who have different kinds of experience. It focuses on skills, education, and character traits, rather than experience.
If none of these work for you, and you dream of adopting a more creative approach that makes a difference, the combination (or hybrid) resume format is exactly what you’re looking for. It allows you to focus on both your experience and your skills, making it a ‘best of both worlds’ format. It’s also suitable for those who want to spice things up by adding different creative sections (e.g. ‘life philosophy’ or ‘what my day looks like’).
Here are some additional tips on perfecting your resume layout and style:
- Go for a traditional resume font sized 12p;
- Use standard 1-inch resume margins for increased readability;
- Make sure your resume fits on a one-page template. In case you’ve got 10 years of experience or more, your resume’s length can reach two pages;
- Avoid unwanted editing and plagiarism – save your resume as PDF before sending it to the recruiters.
Want to take it a step further? Learn how to make your resume stand out without relying too much on creativity.
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PRO TIP
Test your draft Software Development Engineer resume by sending it out to peers and mentors in your circles. Ask them to review it as if they are hiring you for a project and implement the feedback afterwards.
Want to include something more to your Software Development Engineer resume?
So you’ve already listed details about your education, experience, and skills. You’ve also crafted an amazing summary.
But now you feel a creative urge to showcase your personality and not just your expertise.
We’ve got you! Thanks to our modern templates, you can now include a chart of what your typical day looks like or even a word or two about your life philosophy. All this without sacrificing your Software Development Engineer resume’s professional feel.
Some non-traditional sections for your resume include:
Making your software development engineer resume stand out
You want to make a strong first impression to all recruiters that get a hold of your resume. Sure you do! But how?
Well, the easiest way to stand out is by adding a bit of creativity to your Software Development Engineer resume. You could do this by going for a colorful layout or adding a creative section or two. It all depends on the industry and the position you’re applying for!
For instance, a position in design would allow for a more colorful resume, while a position in finance would probably not.
What makes a great software development engineer resume: key takeaways
- Choose a resume layout that sends the right message across and fits your current career situation;
- Create a resume header that shows your desired job title, and easy to find contact numbers;
- Be specific about your experience, accomplishments and future goals in your summary;
- Feature detailed metrics and specific examples that show the impact you made in your previous roles when describing your experience;
- List soft skills backed by examples;
- Add all of your technical skills and certifications that you have and match the job description;
- Show off a dash of personality in your resume that will demonstrate your culture fit and the right mix of hard and soft skills.