Software Engineer CV Example (Australia)

Software engineering CVs in Australia are skimmed by a recruiter for the languages, the cloud platform and the right to work, then read closely by an engineering manager who will test whether the bullets are really yours. Sydney and Melbourne have most of the vacancies, split between the banks and insurers, the large software companies with Australian offices, government and a crowded startup scene. Write every line so you would enjoy being asked about it in the technical interview.

The Sample CV below belongs to a backend-leaning Software Engineer with six years at a Melbourne payments company and an agritech startup in regional Victoria. Each bullet has a system, an action and a measured result: payouts per hour, latency, incidents, cloud cost or time saved for other engineers.

Adjust the order for each vacancy. A bank or a government agency wants reliability, security and a clearance; a product company wants features users noticed; a startup wants breadth and shipping speed. Mirror the advert's language names and cloud platform exactly, and say your right to work in one line. The US counterpart of this page is the software engineer resume example, written for American employers on Letter paper; the Stack template is a skills-first layout that still parses cleanly in recruitment systems.

Updated . The person and employers in this Sample CV are fictional. Written for applicants in Australia; the page for applicants in the US is the software engineer resume example.

Software Engineer sample CV

Drawn at A4 proportions, the paper an Australian CV is printed on.

Ethan Kowalczyk

Software Engineer, Backend and Cloud (Go, TypeScript, AWS), Australian citizen

Fitzroy, VICethan.kowalczyk@example.com0491 572 318

Summary

Software Engineer with six years building backend services in Go and TypeScript for payments and agritech products on AWS. Designed the settlement service that now reconciles every merchant payout on the platform, with no reconciliation break since launch, and cut the team's cloud bill by about a third. Cares about on-call health, clear design documents and code the next engineer can change safely.

Experience

Software Engineer, Flinders Lane Payments Pty Ltd

– Present

Melbourne, VIC

  • Designed and built a merchant settlement service in Go that reconciles 2,800 payouts an hour at peak against the bank's NPP and BECS files, replacing a batch job that ran overnight.
  • Cut p99 latency on the card authorisation path from 390 ms to 160 ms by removing two synchronous calls and adding a read-through cache in Redis.
  • Led the incident review process for the team; pages per on-call week fell from nine to two over a year, and the runbooks are now the template for the platform group.
  • Right-sized the team's RDS and ECS footprint in the Sydney region and moved batch work to spot capacity, cutting the monthly AWS bill by about a third.
Software Engineer, Goulburn Valley Agritech

–

Shepparton, VIC

  • Built the irrigation telemetry API in TypeScript and PostgreSQL used by 900 farm accounts and the grower web app, ingesting sensor readings every five minutes.
  • Replaced a nightly CSV import with an event-driven pipeline on SQS and Lambda, so soil moisture alerts reach growers in seconds instead of the next morning.
  • Added contract tests between four services, which caught breaking API changes before release and ended a run of weekend hotfixes.

Education

Bachelor of Computer Science

University of the Yarra Valley, Melbourne, VIC

Skills

  • Go
  • TypeScript and Node.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, SQS)
  • Terraform
  • Docker and Kubernetes
  • gRPC and REST
  • Observability (Datadog, Grafana)
  • CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
  • System design
  • Payments and reconciliation

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate, Amazon Web Services,

Start yours from this example

Opens this sample in the editor, in one of the templates below. Swap in your details, then tailor it to each vacancy in about two minutes.

Use this example

How an Australian CV differs

A software engineer's CV in Australia reads much like the UK one with three local differences. The first is length: two to three pages of A4 is normal, so an engineer with ten years of work does not have to compress it to one. The second is the right to work, which a recruiter needs in the first ten seconds: citizen, permanent resident, or the visa and its expiry. The third is the clearance and compliance layer around the banks and government, where a Baseline or NV1 clearance and experience under APRA or the Essential Eight decide whether you can be put forward at all. Referees are listed at the end, and government and university vacancies still ask for a statement against selection criteria.

For a software engineer in Australia

  1. Right to work in the header

    Write Australian citizen, permanent resident, or the visa subclass and its expiry in one line near the contact details. Sponsorship is possible on a Skills in Demand visa but many adverts exclude it, and the recruiter will ask on the first call.

  2. Security clearances for government and defence

    A Baseline, NV1 or NV2 clearance from AGSVA is a hard requirement for many Canberra and defence-adjacent roles, and only citizens can hold one. If you have one, put it in the headline; if you are eligible, say so.

  3. Banks, APRA and the Essential Eight

    The big four banks and the insurers hire under APRA's CPS 234 and the ASD Essential Eight. A bullet showing you have built or operated a service under those controls is worth more than a security certification.

  4. Two to three pages, a GitHub link and referees

    Use the length to show scale and results, put a GitHub or portfolio link in the header, and name two referees at the end, usually your current engineering manager and a previous one.

  5. Titles and seniority as Australian employers use them

    Graduate, Software Engineer, Senior, Lead, Staff and Principal, with Developer used interchangeably with Engineer. Match the advert's word; the shortlisting screen does.

Every CV in Australia

A4 paper
Australia prints on A4. A Letter-sized PDF prints short on A4 and tells a recruiter the CV came from a US template.
Two to three pages
Australian CVs run longer than UK ones: two pages is normal and three is accepted for experienced applicants. One page suits a first job.
No photo
No photo, date of birth or marital status. Australian employers do not expect them, and anti-discrimination law makes most prefer not to see them.
Dates as DD/MM/YYYY
Day first where a full date appears, month and year for each role. The US month-first order reads wrong to an Australian recruiter.
Australian English
Australian English follows British spelling: organise, programme, centre, licence, specialise.
Suburb and state, not a street address
"Parramatta, NSW" is enough on the contact line. A full address is not expected, and the US-style ZIP line never is.

More on applying in Australia, with every CV example for it, on the Australia page.

Templates for the software engineer CV

All templates

Every template exports on A4. The previews are drawn on Letter; the editor sets the page size when you export.

How the CV changes with experience

The same software engineer CV, written at three levels: a profile and three bullets for each.

Entry level

Zero to two years, or a first post in the title

Computer science graduate with two internships in Sydney and a capstone project in distributed systems. Writes tested, readable code and asks good questions in code review. Australian permanent resident.

  • Built a feature flag service during an internship at a Sydney fintech that the team kept in production after I left.
  • Wrote integration tests for a billing API that brought coverage on its critical paths to full.
  • Built a distributed key-value store for a capstone project with leader election and snapshotting.

Mid level

Three to seven years, owns a process or a workload

Software Engineer with four years owning backend services from design to on-call, in Python and Go on AWS, for a Brisbane logistics company.

  • Own the notifications service, sending 1.5 million messages a day to drivers and customers.
  • Cut cloud spend on the team's services by right-sizing databases and adding autoscaling.
  • Mentor two graduate engineers and review most of the team's pull requests.

Senior

Eight years or more, leads people, budgets or programmes

Senior Software Engineer with ten years designing high-volume systems for a big-four bank, leading cross-team technical projects and raising engineering standards, with a Baseline security clearance.

  • Led the re-architecture of the payments pipeline across three teams, removing the single database that limited growth.
  • Set the service standards (logging, alerts, runbooks) now required for every new service in the division.
  • Interview and calibrate engineering candidates, and mentor four engineers toward promotion.

Skills to put on the software engineer CV

Hard skills

One or two core languages in depth
Engineering managers trust depth over a long list, so name the languages you would pick for a live coding interview.
System design
Mid-level and senior interviews in Australia include a design round, and bullets about designing services prepare the ground for it.
Cloud platforms, usually AWS
Most Australian employers run on AWS in the Sydney region, with Azure in government and GCP in a few product companies; match the one the advert names.
Databases (SQL and NoSQL)
Almost every backend role involves data modelling and query performance, which interviewers probe with real examples.
Testing and CI/CD
Engineers who ship safely and often reduce incidents, which is a result every team values.
Observability and on-call
Owning production health shows maturity, and fewer pages or faster recovery are measurable results.
Security and compliance basics
Banks, insurers and government ask about secure coding, APRA CPS 234 and the Essential Eight, and a line showing you have worked under them opens those doors.

Soft skills

Written design communication
Design documents are how engineers get agreement across teams, and a good one is the clearest sign of seniority.
Code review and mentoring
Lifting the engineers around you is expected from mid level upward, and managers ask your referees about it.
Working with product partners
An engineer who understands the customer problem builds the right thing the first time.

Mistakes that cost software engineer interviews

  1. Bullets that only list technologies

    Used Kafka, Redis and Kubernetes describes a stack, not your work. Say what you built with them, why, and what changed: throughput, latency, reliability or cost.

  2. No right to work

    A CV with no visa or citizenship line goes to the back of a recruiter's pile while they find out. Say it in the header and move on.

  3. Claiming the whole team's project

    Interviewers ask what you personally did. Be precise: designed the schema, wrote the migration, led the rollout. Precision reads as confidence.

  4. A one-page US-style page

    A single Letter-sized page with a US address line and American spelling tells a recruiter the CV came from somewhere else. Use two to three pages of A4, Australian spelling and the right-to-work line.

  5. Leaving out scale

    The same feature is a different job at a hundred users or ten million. Give requests per second, data volume, accounts or merchants wherever you can.

Questions about the software engineer CV

Should I put a GitHub link on a software engineer CV?

Yes, if it shows work you are proud of. A thin profile does not hurt much, but a few maintained projects or open-source contributions help, especially for a graduate or a visa holder who needs to show evidence quickly.

How long should a software engineer CV be in Australia?

Two pages for most engineers, three for a senior or principal with a long record. Keep the right-to-work line, the core languages and the current role on the first page.

Do I need a security clearance?

Only for government, defence and some critical infrastructure roles. If you are a citizen and the advert says must be eligible for a Baseline clearance, write eligible for a Baseline clearance in the header.

What is the best CV format for a software engineer?

A single-column, reverse-chronological layout with a short skills section near the top. It reads well in recruitment systems and lets an engineer find your recent work in seconds.

Do I need a computer science degree?

Many Australian employers do not require one, though a migration skills assessment through the ACS may. Show equivalent evidence instead: shipped projects, production experience, open-source work and the system design depth the role expects.

How do I tailor a software engineer CV to an advert?

Mirror the advert's languages and cloud platform where they are true of you, move the most similar project to the top and rewrite the profile for that team's problem. Paste the advert into Resume Master and it rewrites the CV against it in about two minutes.

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