Software engineer résumé: what gets you shortlisted in India

What recruiters look for

• Your stack in the first few lines, matching the job: languages, frameworks, cloud, databases.
• Scale: users, requests, data volume, latency, uptime.
• Ownership: what you designed or led, not only what you “worked on”.
• For freshers: two or three real projects with links, internships, and competitive programming or hackathon results if you have them.

Bullet rewrites

• Before

  Worked on backend APIs using Node.js.

  After

  Built 14 REST endpoints in Node.js for the seller dashboard, serving 30K daily users at p95 under 200 ms.

• Before

  Fixed bugs and improved performance.

  After

  Cut the checkout page’s load time 45% by moving image resizing to a queue and caching product data in Redis.

• Before

  Made a chat app project.

  After

  Built a real-time chat app (React, Socket.IO, MongoDB) with typing indicators and read receipts; 60+ classmates used it for a semester. Code: github.com/…

Structure

• Freshers: Summary, Education (with CGPA if 7.5+), Projects, Internships, Skills, Achievements. One page.
• Experienced: Summary, Experience, Skills, selected Projects, Education. One page under 3 years; two pages after about 7.
• Group skills: Languages, Frameworks, Cloud & DevOps, Databases. Only list what you could be interviewed on.
• Link GitHub and a portfolio or deployed project, and make sure the linked repos have a README.

Common mistakes

• A wall of 30 technologies with no proof of any of them.
• Projects described by features instead of what problem they solved.
• Coursework and tutorials (to-do apps, clones) listed as major projects.
• Skill-level bars and ratings like “Java 4/5”, which mean nothing to a reader and confuse parsers.

Templates for technology & engineering

• Swiss Grid
• Midnight Tech
• Mono Minimal

Questions