Software Engineer CV Example (Ireland)

A Software Engineer CV in Ireland is read by two very different people: a talent partner at a Dublin multinational working through hundreds of applicants, and an engineering manager at a Galway or Cork product company who will read your bullets closely and then ask about them. It has to pass the first reader on languages, scale and cloud platform, and survive the second on whether the systems and numbers are really yours. Write every line as something you would enjoy being asked about in a technical screen.

The Sample CV below is for a backend Software Engineer with six years at a Dublin payments company and a Galway health software firm, working in Java, Kotlin and Python on AWS. Each bullet has a system, an action and a measured result: transactions per second, latency, incidents, cloud cost or time saved for other engineers.

Tailor it to the employer. A multinational's EMEA engineering hub wants scale, on-call maturity and a named cloud; an Irish product company wants ownership from design to production; a regulated fintech wants PSD2, SEPA and audit trails. The US counterpart of this page is the software engineer resume example, written for American employers on Letter paper. The Stack template keeps a skills-first layout readable to the parsers large employers use.

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

Software Engineer sample CV

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

Oisín Maguire

Software Engineer, Backend, Java and Kotlin on AWS, Dublin

Dublin 2oisin.maguire@example.com087 555 0128

Summary

Software Engineer with six years building backend services in Java, Kotlin and Python for payments and healthcare products, currently on the core ledger team of a Dublin payments company. Designed the SEPA instant payments service that now clears every euro transfer on the platform, with no reconciliation break since launch. Cares about on-call health, short design documents and code the next engineer can change without fear.

Experience

Software Engineer II, Dodder Payments

– Present

Dublin 2

  • Designed and built the SEPA instant payments service in Kotlin and Spring Boot, handling 2,800 transfers per second at peak with a ten-second end-to-end limit, replacing a batch process that settled once an hour.
  • 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 team's incident review process; pages per on-call week fell from nine to two over a year, and the runbooks I wrote are now the template for the platform group.
  • Wrote the design and migration plan for moving four services to Kubernetes on AWS in the Dublin region, completed with no customer-facing downtime and with data residency kept inside the EU for GDPR.
Software Engineer, Corrib Health Software

–

Galway

  • Built the appointment scheduling API in Java and PostgreSQL used by 140 GP practices and the patient app, with slot searches returning in under 200 ms.
  • Replaced a nightly HL7 file import with an event-driven pipeline on Kafka, so lab results reach the practice within minutes rather than the next morning.
  • Added contract tests between five services, which caught breaking API changes before each release and cut hotfixes in half over the following year.

Education

BSc (Hons) Computer Science, First Class, NFQ Level 8

University of Connacht, Galway

Final year project on distributed consensus; eight-month placement with a Galway medical device company.

Skills

  • Java and Kotlin
  • Python
  • Spring Boot
  • PostgreSQL
  • Kafka
  • Redis
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS (EKS, RDS, SQS)
  • Terraform
  • REST and gRPC
  • Observability (Prometheus, Grafana)
  • CI/CD with GitLab

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – 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.

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How an Irish CV differs

An Irish Software Engineer CV reads like the American one in its bullets but not in its frame. The page is two sides of A4 with a short profile at the top; the degree is given with its NFQ level because employers and the Critical Skills Employment Permit both ask for it; and right to work is stated plainly, since Dublin's engineering hubs hire from across the EU and beyond. Interview loops at the multinationals are long and structured, so the CV should give the interviewer a system to ask about in every role.

For a software engineer in Ireland

  1. Right to work, stated once

    EU and EEA citizens need no permit; everyone else should say what they hold, for example a Critical Skills Employment Permit, Stamp 1G or Stamp 4, in one line near the end. Employers that sponsor want to know early, and those that cannot will not waste your time.

  2. NFQ level on the degree

    Write BSc (Hons) Computer Science, NFQ Level 8, or MSc, Level 9. The level is how Irish employers and the permit system compare qualifications from different countries.

  3. Multinational hub or Irish product company

    The large US and global firms in Dublin screen on scale, on-call and a named cloud, then run a structured loop. Irish-owned companies in Cork, Galway and Limerick read for ownership and range. Reorder the bullets for the one in front of you.

  4. Regulated domains and GDPR

    Payments, health and insurance work in Ireland sits under the Central Bank, HIQA and GDPR. Naming PSD2, SEPA, data residency or audit trails where they were part of your work is read as experience, not padding.

  5. Contracting through an umbrella or a limited company

    If you contracted, write Software Engineer (contract) with the client and the length, and say whether you worked through an umbrella company or your own limited company, since agencies in Ireland ask.

Every CV in Ireland

A4 paper
The page is A4. Irish employers print and file on A4, and a Letter-sized PDF is the first sign a CV was written for the US.
Two pages is normal
Two pages is the norm for an Irish CV. Graduates fit one; nobody needs three unless the role is senior.
No photo
No photo, date of birth or marital status. Irish employers do not ask for them, and leaving them off keeps the page about the work.
Dates as DD/MM/YYYY
Day, month, year where a full date appears; month and year for each role. The US month-first order confuses the reader.
Irish English
Irish English follows British spelling: organise, programme, centre, licence, specialise.
Town or Dublin postal district, not a street address
"Dublin 8" or "Cork" is enough on the contact line. A full address is not expected, and the US-style "City, ST 12345" line never is.

More on applying in Ireland, with every CV example for it, on the Ireland 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 a Level 8 degree, two software engineering internships and a final year project in distributed systems. Writes tested, readable code and asks good questions in code review.

  • Built a feature flag service during an internship that the team kept in production after the placement ended.
  • Wrote integration tests for a billing API that brought its critical paths to full coverage.
  • Built a distributed key-value store for the final year 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 Cork SaaS company.

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

Senior

Eight years or more, leads people, budgets or programmes

Senior Software Engineer with ten years designing high-volume systems, leading cross-team technical projects and raising engineering standards across a Dublin engineering hub.

  • Led the re-architecture of the order 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 company.
  • Interview and calibrate engineering candidates, and mentor four engineers towards 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 loops in Dublin include a design round, and bullets about designing services prepare the ground for it.
Databases (SQL and NoSQL)
Almost every backend role involves data modelling and query performance, which interviewers probe with real examples.
A cloud platform such as AWS, GCP or Azure
Adverts name one, and matching it exactly helps both the parser and the talent partner.
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 outcomes.
Messaging and streaming (Kafka, queues)
Event-driven systems are common in payments and health platforms and set you apart for platform roles.

Soft skills

Written design communication
Design documents are how engineers get agreement across teams and time zones, and good ones are a sign of seniority.
Code review and mentoring
Lifting the people around you is a core expectation from mid level upward.
Working with product partners
Engineers who understand the customer problem build 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. Claiming the whole team's project

    A Dublin interview loop will ask what you personally did. Be precise: designed the schema, wrote the migration, led the rollout. Precision reads as confidence.

  3. Leaving right to work to the recruiter to guess

    A CV from outside the EU with no permit line is often set aside rather than queried. State what you hold, or that you need sponsorship, once and clearly.

  4. No scale

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

  5. Three pages of old projects

    Keep older roles short so your recent, most relevant work sits on the first side. A talent partner decides long before the second.

Questions about the software engineer CV

Should a Software Engineer CV in Ireland include a GitHub link?

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 earlier in your career.

How many programming languages should I list?

The ones you could be interviewed in, usually three to six. Put your strongest first and make sure the bullets show you using them.

Do I need to mention my visa or work permit?

Yes, once. Write that you hold a Critical Skills Employment Permit, a Stamp 1G or Stamp 4, or that you are an EU citizen, in a single line near the end. Leaving it out costs more interviews than stating it.

Do I need a computer science degree to be a Software Engineer in Ireland?

Many employers do not require one, though the Critical Skills permit does ask for a Level 8 degree or equivalent experience. Show shipped projects, production experience and the system design depth the role expects.

How long should a Software Engineer CV be?

Two sides of A4. Graduates fit one; nobody needs three. Link to GitHub and the portfolio for anything that will not fit.

How do I tailor a Software Engineer CV to a job advert?

Mirror the advert's languages and cloud platform where they are true of you, move the most similar system to the top and rewrite the profile for that team's problem. Resume Master does this against a pasted advert in about two minutes, and the keyword checker shows which words are still missing.

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