A fictional person: the names, employers and numbers are invented.
Alex Morgan
Software Engineer · Python, Go, AWS
Manchester, UKalex.morgan@example.com
Summary
Software engineer with five years' experience building payment and logistics back ends in Python and Go. Known for services that stay fast under load, cloud bills that go down and releases that ship behind tests. Most recently cut checkout latency by 38% and moved billing out of a monolith with zero downtime.
Experience
Software Engineer · Brightwell Payments, Manchester
2023 – Present
Cut p95 checkout API latency from 640 ms to 395 ms by adding Redis caching and rewriting two hot SQL queries.
Led the move of billing from a Django monolith to three Go services on AWS ECS over 14 months, with no customer-facing downtime.
Reduced the monthly AWS bill by £6,200 (21%) by right-sizing instances and moving nightly batch jobs to Spot capacity.
Raised test coverage on the payments core from 52% to 84%; new contract tests caught 30+ breaking changes before release.
Mentored two junior engineers through their first on-call rotations and wrote the team's incident-review template.
REST and gRPC API design, test-driven development, code review, incident response
Certificates
AWS Certified Developer – Associate · Amazon Web Services2023
Projects
Stuck-job monitor
2022
A small open-source Go tool that alerts when background jobs stall; 300+ GitHub stars and used by two local start-ups.
Languages
English — Native
Spanish — Intermediate (B1)
Additional information
Volunteer mentor at a weekly after-school coding club (2022 – Present).
Three summary options
Start from the one closest to where you are now.
Graduate
Computer science graduate with a year-long industry placement in Python and React. Built and deployed a room-booking API used by 600 students, with 90% test coverage and automated deploys. Looking for a junior back-end role in a team that takes code review seriously.
Senior or lead
Senior software engineer with nine years in high-traffic e-commerce. Led a team of six through a move to event-driven services that halved failed orders during peak sales. Owns architecture decisions, hiring loops and incident reviews, and still ships production code every week.
Career changer
Former secondary-school maths teacher, now a software engineer after a 16-week bootcamp and two years building internal tools in Python. Explains complex systems in plain words, writes documentation people actually use, and automated a reporting job that saved 10 hours a week.
Keywords to include
Use the ones that are true for you, inside real sentences.
Python
Go
REST APIs
AWS
Docker
CI/CD
PostgreSQL
Microservices
Unit testing
System design
What recruiters look for
Tips for this role, with the kind of numbers that count.
Open each bullet with the result
Swap "responsible for the checkout service" for what changed because of you: "cut p95 latency from 640 ms to 395 ms". Recruiters skim the first few words of each line, so put the verb and the outcome there.
Name the stack inside each job
A skills list says you have heard of a tool; a bullet like "built three Go services on AWS ECS" shows you used it recently and for something real. Keep the list short and let the jobs carry the proof.
Measure scale, speed or money
Good engineering numbers are requests per day, latency, error rates, deploy time, cloud cost and hours saved. If you lack exact figures, an honest estimate ("about 25 hours a week") beats a vague claim.
Show how you work with people
Hiring managers screen for code review, mentoring and calm incident handling as much as for raw skill. One bullet about leading a postmortem or onboarding a junior says more than "team player".
Trim old and obvious lines
Five years of experience fits on one or two pages. Drop school coursework, "Microsoft Office" and tools nobody hires for, and shrink jobs older than ten years to a single line each.
Link only proof that helps
A GitHub or portfolio link is worth adding when two or three pinned projects have a clear README and recent commits. An empty profile or a folder of tutorial clones does more harm than no link at all.
Make this CV yours
Answer one question at a time; the assistant fills each section and never invents numbers.
Should a software engineer CV include a GitHub link?
Yes, if what is there helps you. Pin two or three projects with a clear README that explains the problem, your design and how to run it. If your best work is private company code, leave the link out and describe that work in your bullets instead.
How do I show impact if I only built internal tools?
Measure what the tool changed for its users: hours saved each week, errors avoided, reports that now run automatically, or how many colleagues rely on it. "Automated invoice checks used by a 12-person finance team" is impact, even if no customer ever saw it.
Do I still need a skills section if my stack is in every job?
Keep a short one. Applicant tracking systems and recruiters search for exact terms such as "Go", "Kubernetes" or "PostgreSQL", and a grouped list of 10–15 tools makes them easy to find. Leave out anything you could not discuss in an interview.
