A fictional person: the names, employers and numbers are invented.
Tomasz Nowak
Senior Backend Developer · Kotlin, Java, distributed systems
Bristol, UKtomasz.nowak@example.comRight to work: UK settled status
Summary
Senior backend developer with ten years building APIs and event-driven systems for energy and insurance companies. Specialises in services that keep running at 3 a.m.: clear SLOs, sensible retries, observability and boring, reversible releases. Took a smart-meter platform from 99.5% to 99.95% availability while traffic tripled.
Speaker at a regional JVM meetup on idempotent event handling (2023).
Three summary options
Start from the one closest to where you are now.
Mid-level developer
Backend developer with three years in Node.js and PostgreSQL at a delivery start-up. Built the order-tracking API used by 150 restaurants and cut its error rate from 2% to 0.3%. Looking to grow into system design and own services end to end.
Platform focus
Backend developer who drifted happily towards the platform side. Seven years in Java and Go, the last three running shared Kubernetes clusters for 40 engineers. Built golden-path templates that cut a new service's setup time from two weeks to one afternoon.
Returning to work
Experienced backend developer returning after a two-year career break for family. Six years of Java and Spring Boot in retail banking, including the payment-limits service for 1.5 million customers. Recently refreshed skills with Kotlin coroutines and a course on Kafka.
Keywords to include
Use the ones that are true for you, inside real sentences.
Kotlin
Java
Spring Boot
Kafka
API design
OpenAPI
Kubernetes
Observability
Event-driven architecture
SQL
What recruiters look for
Tips for this role, with the kind of numbers that count.
Write about reliability in its own numbers
Availability, error rate, latency percentiles and mean time to recovery are the language of backend work. "MTTR fell from 70 to 18 minutes" is far stronger than "improved monitoring", and it invites a good interview conversation.
Describe the consumers of your APIs
An API matters because someone depends on it. Say who: 23 broker partners, four mobile teams, a regulator's reporting feed. Then give the effect of your work, such as fewer integration tickets or faster onboarding.
Explain one hard design decision
Senior roles are hired for judgement. A bullet that names the problem and the pattern you chose, for example an outbox to stop duplicate bills, shows how you think. Keep it to one line and save the detail for interview.
Show seniority beyond your own code
Design reviews, guilds, runbooks, on-call rotas and hiring panels are what separate senior from mid-level. Count them where you can: "run design reviews for 14 engineers" says more than "technical leadership".
Match the job's stack honestly
If the role asks for Node.js and you mostly write Kotlin, say so plainly and point to transferable work: HTTP APIs, PostgreSQL, Kafka, testing. Recruiters forgive a different language far more readily than a stretched claim.
Make this CV yours
Answer one question at a time; the assistant fills each section and never invents numbers.
Should I list every database and message queue I've touched?
No. List the ones you could design with today and that the job mentions, usually three to five. A long list of data stores suggests surface knowledge. Put the depth in your bullets, such as how you modelled data in PostgreSQL or handled ordering in Kafka.
How do I describe on-call work on a backend CV?
Treat it as a strength. Mention the rota size, the services covered and what you improved because of incidents: better alerts, runbooks or automatic rollbacks. A result like "pages per week down from 12 to 3" shows you made on-call better for everyone.
Is a backend developer CV different from a software engineer CV?
The format is the same, but the focus is narrower. A backend CV should spend most of its space on APIs, data, performance and reliability, with frontend or mobile work kept to a line. Use the job title the advert uses so search filters find you.
