SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER RESUME TEMPLATE
=========================================

[YOUR FULL NAME]
[City, State] | [Phone Number] | [Email Address]
[LinkedIn URL] | [GitHub URL] | [Technical Blog/Portfolio URL]

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
--------------------
Senior software engineer with [X]+ years building [type of systems] at scale. Expert in [primary technologies/domain] with proven track record leading [X]-person teams and architecting systems serving [number]M+ users. [Recent major accomplishment with business impact]. Seeking [specific type of senior role] to [career objective aligned with company needs].

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE
-------------------
Languages & Frameworks: [Core technologies with years of experience]
Architecture & Design: [Microservices, Distributed Systems, Event-Driven Architecture, etc.]
Cloud & Infrastructure: [AWS/GCP/Azure services, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, etc.]
Databases & Storage: [SQL, NoSQL, Caching, Data warehousing solutions]
Leadership & Practices: [Technical Leadership, System Design, Code Review, Mentorship, Agile/Scrum]

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
-----------------------
[Senior Job Title - Senior Software Engineer, Staff Engineer, Tech Lead]
[Company Name] ([company description with scale]), [City, State] | [Month Year] – Present

Technical Leadership & Architecture:
• Led architecture design for [system/platform] serving [number]M+ users with [X%] uptime
• Architected [distributed system/microservices] handling [number]+ requests per second at [X]ms p99 latency
• Designed and implemented [technical solution] that enabled [X]x scale growth with [cost/performance metric]
• Made critical technical decisions for [number]+ projects impacting [business outcome]
• Proposed and drove adoption of [technology/practice] across [number]-person engineering org

System Performance & Scale:
• Optimized [core system] reducing infrastructure costs by $[amount] annually while improving performance [X%]
• Built [distributed system/service] processing [number]+ [events/transactions] daily with [reliability metric]
• Reduced [system latency/load time] from [X] to [Y], improving [business metric] by [Z%]
• Implemented [caching/optimization strategy] supporting [X]x traffic growth with same infrastructure
• Scaled [system] from [X] to [Y] users maintaining sub-[number]ms response times

Team Leadership & Mentorship:
• Led team of [number] engineers delivering [number]+ major features quarterly
• Mentored [number] engineers resulting in [number] promotions and [X%] improvement in team velocity
• Conducted [number]+ technical interviews establishing hiring bar for [level/role]
• Drove technical direction for [team/product] aligning [number] engineers around shared vision
• Established engineering best practices adopted across [number]-person organization

Technical Excellence & Quality:
• Improved system reliability from [X%] to [Y%] uptime through [specific technical work]
• Reduced production incidents by [X%] through [monitoring/alerting/architectural improvements]
• Led migration from [old tech] to [new tech] for [number]+ services with zero downtime
• Increased deployment frequency from [X] to [Y] per week through [CI/CD improvements]
• Championed testing culture increasing coverage from [X%] to [Y%] across codebase

[Previous Senior Role]
[Company Name], [City, State] | [Month Year] – [Month Year]

• Architected [system/platform] that [business impact with scale metric]
• Led [number]-person team building [product/feature] generating $[revenue] or serving [number] users
• Designed [technical solution] reducing [problem] by [X%] while improving [metric]
• Mentored [number] engineers across [teams/organization]
• Drove technical decisions for [scope] impacting [number]+ engineers
• Improved [system metric] by [X%] through [technical leadership/architecture work]
• Collaborated with [C-level/senior leadership] on [strategic technical initiative]

[Earlier Role - Can be condensed]
[Company Name], [City, State] | [Month Year] – [Month Year]

• [Major technical accomplishment with business impact]
• [Architecture or scale achievement]
• [Leadership or mentorship contribution]

NOTABLE PROJECTS & CONTRIBUTIONS
---------------------------------
[Open Source Project or Major Side Project]
• [Brief description of significant technical contribution]
• [Impact metric - users, performance, adoption]
• [Recognition or community impact]

EDUCATION
---------
[Bachelor's/Master's Degree] in [Computer Science/Related Field]
[University Name], [City, State] | [Year]

PUBLICATIONS & SPEAKING (if applicable)
----------------------------------------
• [Conference Talk Title], [Conference Name], [Year]
• [Technical Blog Post/Article Title], [Publication], [Year]
• [Patent Title], [Patent Number], [Year]


FILL-IN INSTRUCTIONS FOR SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERS:
====================================================

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:
- Lead with years of experience and scale you've worked at
- Emphasize leadership and architecture experience
- Include your most significant business impact
- Mention team sizes you've led
- Keep to 4-5 lines
- Example: "Senior software engineer with 8+ years building distributed systems at scale. Expert in microservices architecture with proven track record leading 10-person teams and architecting platforms serving 50M+ users. Recently designed payment processing system handling $100M+ annually with 99.99% uptime. Seeking Staff Engineer role to drive technical strategy at growth-stage company."

WHAT MAKES SENIOR LEVEL DIFFERENT:
- Leadership and mentorship are critical
- Architecture and system design are primary focus
- Business impact and strategic thinking
- Team and organizational influence
- Technical decision-making authority
- Cross-functional collaboration with leadership
- Setting technical direction and standards

KEY SENIOR-LEVEL RESPONSIBILITIES:

Technical Leadership:
- Architecture design and decisions
- Technical strategy and roadmap
- System design and scalability
- Technology selection and evaluation
- Technical debt management
- Production reliability ownership

People Leadership:
- Team mentorship and growth
- Code review and quality standards
- Technical hiring and interviewing
- Performance feedback and coaching
- Engineering culture and practices
- Cross-team collaboration

Strategic Impact:
- Business outcome ownership
- Cost optimization at scale
- Risk assessment and mitigation
- Long-term technical planning
- Engineering productivity improvements
- Organizational technical standards

METRICS THAT MATTER FOR SENIOR ENGINEERS:

Scale Metrics:
- "Serving 50M+ daily active users"
- "Processing 100M+ events per day"
- "Handling 500K+ requests per second"
- "$500M+ in annual transaction volume"

Business Impact:
- "Reduced infrastructure costs by $2M annually"
- "Enabled $10M+ in new revenue"
- "Improved conversion rate by 15% = $5M revenue"
- "Supported 10x company growth"

Team Impact:
- "Led 12-person engineering team"
- "Mentored 8 engineers to senior level"
- "Hired and onboarded 15 engineers"
- "Established practices across 50-person org"

Technical Excellence:
- "99.99% uptime for critical systems"
- "Reduced p99 latency from 2s to 100ms"
- "Zero-downtime migration of 100+ services"
- "Improved deployment frequency 10x"

ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN EMPHASIS:

System Design:
- "Designed distributed system architecture"
- "Architected microservices platform"
- "Proposed event-driven architecture"
- "Led API design and standards"

Scalability:
- "Designed for 100x scale growth"
- "Architected horizontally scalable system"
- "Implemented sharding strategy"
- "Built auto-scaling infrastructure"

Reliability:
- "Designed for high availability"
- "Implemented circuit breaker patterns"
- "Built comprehensive monitoring and alerting"
- "Established SLO/SLI framework"

LEADERSHIP ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

Technical Mentorship:
- "Mentored 10 engineers resulting in 5 promotions"
- "Established code review culture improving quality 40%"
- "Created technical growth framework for team"
- "Led architecture review board"

Hiring & Team Building:
- "Interviewed 100+ candidates with 95% offer acceptance"
- "Built team from 3 to 15 engineers"
- "Established hiring standards and process"
- "Reduced time-to-hire by 50%"

Technical Direction:
- "Drove adoption of microservices across organization"
- "Led migration from monolith to distributed architecture"
- "Established API design guidelines"
- "Championed shift to cloud-native architecture"

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION:

With Product:
- "Partnered with product leadership on technical roadmap"
- "Translated business requirements into technical solutions"
- "Advised on technical feasibility and tradeoffs"

With Leadership:
- "Presented technical strategy to C-level executives"
- "Advised CTO on architecture decisions"
- "Led technical due diligence for acquisition"

With Other Teams:
- "Coordinated with 5 engineering teams on platform migration"
- "Led cross-functional initiative across 50+ engineers"
- "Established API contracts with partner teams"

QUANTIFYING LEADERSHIP:

Before: "Led engineering team"
After: "Led 8-person team delivering 12 major features per quarter while improving velocity 30%"

Before: "Mentored junior engineers"
After: "Mentored 6 engineers through code reviews and design sessions, resulting in 3 promotions to senior level"

Before: "Made architecture decisions"
After: "Drove architecture decisions for 15+ services serving 20M+ users, reducing operational costs by $1M annually"

TECHNICAL DEPTH AT SENIOR LEVEL:

Show Breadth:
- Full-stack capabilities
- Multiple language proficiency
- Various system types built
- Different architectural patterns

Show Depth:
- Deep expertise in core technologies
- Understanding of internals and tradeoffs
- Performance optimization experience
- Production debugging and operations

Show Judgment:
- Technology selection rationale
- Architectural tradeoffs considered
- Risk assessment and mitigation
- Long-term maintainability thinking

WHAT TO EMPHASIZE BY ROLE:

Staff Engineer:
- Technical strategy and vision
- Organizational impact
- Cross-team leadership
- Architecture at scale

Tech Lead:
- Team technical direction
- Delivery and execution
- People mentorship
- Code quality and practices

Principal Engineer:
- Company-wide technical influence
- Strategic technology decisions
- External thought leadership
- Innovation and research

Engineering Manager (if transitioning):
- People management experience
- Team building and growth
- Project delivery and planning
- Stakeholder management

STRONG ACTION VERBS FOR SENIOR LEVEL:
- Architected, Designed, Led, Drove, Established
- Scaled, Optimized, Transformed, Migrated
- Mentored, Coached, Hired, Built (teams)
- Influenced, Advised, Proposed, Championed
- Collaborated, Partnered, Aligned

WHAT TO INCLUDE:

Technical Blog:
- Shows thought leadership
- Demonstrates communication skills
- Proves deep technical knowledge
- Include if you write regularly

Conference Speaking:
- Industry recognition
- Communication abilities
- Technical expertise
- Include talks at known conferences

Open Source:
- Still valuable at senior level
- Major contributions or maintainer roles
- Shows community engagement
- Quality over quantity

Patents:
- Innovation and invention
- Strategic thinking
- Include if relevant to role

WHAT TO AVOID:
- Too much focus on coding tasks
- Missing leadership accomplishments
- No business impact metrics
- Lack of scale indicators
- No team or organizational influence
- Technical details without context
- Outdated technologies emphasized

EDUCATION SECTION:
- Brief at senior level
- Advanced degrees (MS, PhD) worth mentioning
- Omit graduation year if concerned about age bias
- Research or thesis work if relevant
- Teaching experience if applicable

FORMATTING:
- 2 pages acceptable (even preferred) for senior level
- Clear hierarchy of information
- Leadership and impact prominent
- Technical depth demonstrated
- Professional and polished
- Consistent formatting throughout

CUSTOMIZATION:
- Emphasize leadership for management-track roles
- Emphasize technical depth for IC roles
- Highlight relevant industry experience
- Match company stage and culture
- Adjust for role level (Staff, Principal, etc.)

LENGTH CONSIDERATIONS:
- Don't artificially constrain to 1 page
- 2 pages allows proper depth
- Include substantive content only
- Remove less relevant older experience
- Focus on last 10-12 years primarily

LINKS & ONLINE PRESENCE:
- LinkedIn should be complete and current
- GitHub valuable if actively maintained
- Technical blog highly valuable
- Speaker profile/slides if applicable
- Stack Overflow profile if high rep
- Professional portfolio for frontend work