Software Engineer CV Example (UK)

A Software Engineer CV in the UK is read twice: once by a recruiter or an in-house talent team matching languages and the cloud platform against the advert, and once by an engineering manager who will ask about every bullet in the technical interview. Write each line with a system, what you did to it and what changed, so that both readers find what they want and the second one has something to ask you about.

The Sample CV below is for a backend engineer with six years at a Bristol payments company and a Swindon energy software firm. The bullets carry the measures engineering managers trust: requests per second, latency, incidents on call, cloud cost, and the time saved for other engineers.

Tailor it for each vacancy, whether it comes through a recruiter, a company careers page or a job board. A platform role wants reliability and Kubernetes first; a product team wants features users noticed; a fintech wants change control under the FCA. The US counterpart of this page is the software engineer resume example, written for American employers on one Letter page; a UK CV is two sides of A4 and may say outside IR35 where a contract applies. The Stack template puts the technology list where an engineering lead looks for it.

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

Software Engineer sample CV

Drawn at A4 proportions, the paper a UK CV is printed on.

Kieran Oyelaran

Software Engineer, Backend (Go, Python, AWS)

Bristol, BS1kieran.oyelaran@example.com07700 900318

Summary

Backend software engineer with six years building payment and energy services in Go and Python on AWS. Designed the settlement service that now reconciles every card payment on the platform overnight with no manual corrections since launch, and halved the pages the on-call rota receives. Writes design documents people read and code the next engineer can change without fear.

Experience

Software Engineer II, Avonbank Payments

– Present

Bristol

  • Designed and built the settlement service in Go that reconciles around 1.8 million card payments a night against the acquirer files, replacing a batch job that needed manual corrections most weeks.
  • Cut p99 latency on the payment authorisation path from 390 ms to 150 ms by removing two synchronous calls and adding a read-through cache in Redis.
  • Ran the team's incident reviews for a year; pages per on-call week fell from nine to four and every review produced a tracked fix.
  • Wrote the design and migration plan to move three services onto Kubernetes on AWS, delivered with no customer-facing downtime and signed off under the company's FCA change-control process.
Software Engineer, Greenfinch Energy Software

–

Swindon

  • Built the half-hourly meter reading ingestion API in Python and PostgreSQL that handles readings from 600,000 smart meters a day.
  • Replaced an overnight CSV import with an event-driven pipeline on SQS, so supplier dashboards update within minutes instead of the following morning.
  • Introduced contract tests between four services, which caught breaking API changes before release and ended a whole class of production incidents.

Education

BSc (Hons) Computer Science, First Class

University of the Severn Vale, Gloucester

Final-year project on consensus in distributed key-value stores; placement year at a logistics software firm.

Skills

  • Go
  • Python
  • PostgreSQL
  • AWS (ECS, Lambda, SQS)
  • Kubernetes
  • Redis
  • Kafka
  • REST and gRPC
  • Terraform
  • CI/CD with GitHub Actions
  • Observability (Prometheus, Grafana)
  • System design

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 a UK CV differs

A UK Software Engineer CV is longer and plainer than the American one-page resume: two sides of A4, no photo, a short profile and a technology section near the top, written in British English. The title is Software Engineer or Software Developer and the two are used interchangeably, with Senior, Lead and Principal as the steps above. There is no state licence or professional registration, but employers do check your right to work in the UK, and in regulated sectors such as banking and fintech the CV should name the change-control or security clearance you have worked under. Contractors state whether a role was inside or outside IR35; permanent staff do not. Degree classification matters for graduate roles and fades after a few years.

For a software engineer in the UK

  1. Software Engineer or Developer, same job

    UK adverts use Software Engineer, Software Developer and Backend Developer for the same role. Use the advert's own title in your headline for each application, and keep Senior or Lead only where you held it.

  2. Right to work, stated once

    Employers must check your right to work in the UK before you start. One line in the contact section, such as right to work in the UK, saves a recruiter a question; do not add nationality or a passport number.

  3. Degree classification while it still counts

    Graduate schemes and many first roles ask for a 2:1 or above, so write the classification for your first few years. After that, the systems you have shipped matter more than the grade.

  4. Contract work and IR35

    If you have contracted, say so, give the scope of each engagement and state inside or outside IR35. Permanent roles need neither, and a CV that mixes the two without saying which confuses the recruiter.

  5. Regulated sectors and clearance

    Banks, fintechs, the NHS and government suppliers run change control, audit trails and sometimes security clearance such as BPSS or SC. Name what you have worked under; it shortens the path through their vetting.

Every CV in the UK

A4 paper
Set the page to A4, 210 by 297 millimetres. A Letter-sized PDF prints with odd margins on A4 and reads as imported from the US.
Two pages is normal
Most UK CVs run to two pages. One page suits a first job; three is rare and only for senior roles with a lot to show.
No photo, no date of birth
UK employers do not expect a photo, a date of birth, marital status or nationality on a CV, and most prefer not to see them.
Dates as DD/MM/YYYY
Day first where a full date appears, and month and year for each role: "Mar 2022 – Present". Never the US month-first order.
British English
Organise, programme, centre, licence, specialise. A CV in American spelling reads as written for somewhere else.
Town and postcode area, not a street address
A line such as "Manchester, M4" is enough. A full postal address, and the US-style "City, ST 12345" line, are not expected.

More on applying in the UK, with every CV example for it, on the UK 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 placement year, two internships and a final-year distributed systems project. Writes tested, readable code and asks useful questions in code review.

  • Built an internal feature-flag service on placement that the team kept in production after I left.
  • Raised test coverage on a billing API's critical paths to full during a summer internship.
  • Implemented leader election and snapshotting for a key-value store as a final-year project, marked at first-class level.

Mid level

Three to seven years, owns a process or a workload

Software engineer with four years owning backend services from design through to on-call, in Python and Go on AWS for a Bristol scale-up.

  • Own the notifications service that sends about two million emails and push messages a day.
  • Reduced the team's monthly AWS bill by right-sizing databases and adding autoscaling.
  • Mentor two graduate engineers and review the bulk 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, leading cross-team technical work and raising engineering standards across a department.

  • Led the re-architecture of the order pipeline across three teams, removing the single database that capped growth.
  • Wrote the service standards for logging, alerting and runbooks that every new service in the company now follows.
  • Interview and calibrate engineering candidates, and mentor four engineers towards promotion.

Skills to put on the software engineer CV

Hard skills

Depth in one or two languages
Engineering managers trust depth over a long list; name the languages you would choose for a live coding exercise and show them in the bullets.
System design
Mid-level and senior interviews in the UK include a design round, and bullets about services you designed give the interviewer something to ask about.
Relational and NoSQL databases
Almost every backend role turns on data modelling and query performance, and interviewers probe it with examples from your own CV.
A cloud platform: AWS, Azure or GCP
Adverts name one, and matching it exactly helps both the keyword match and the recruiter reading the shortlist.
Testing and CI/CD
Teams that ship safely and often have fewer incidents, and that is a result every engineering lead values.
Observability and on-call
Owning production health shows maturity; fewer pages or faster recovery are results you can put a number on.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform or CloudFormation appears in most platform and backend adverts, and shows you can own a service end to end.

Soft skills

Written design communication
Design documents are how UK engineering teams agree a change across squads, and a good one is a mark of seniority.
Code review and mentoring
Lifting the engineers around you is expected from mid level upwards, and interviewers ask for an example.
Working with product and delivery
Engineers who understand the user's problem build the right thing first time and get trusted with harder work.

Mistakes that cost software engineer interviews

  1. Bullets that only list a stack

    Used Go, Kafka and Kubernetes describes the team's tooling, not your work. Say what you built with them, why, and what moved: throughput, latency, incidents or cost.

  2. Claiming the squad's project as your own

    Interviewers in the UK ask what you personally did, politely and more than once. Use we sparingly and be exact: designed the schema, wrote the migration, led the rollout.

  3. A one-page CV copied from a US template

    A single page with the education at the top and a Letter page size reads as imported. Give the CV two sides of A4, put the most recent role first and leave room for the design and on-call work that gets asked about.

  4. Leaving out scale

    The same feature is a different job at a thousand users or ten million. Give requests per second, records a day, customers or accounts wherever you can.

  5. An out-of-date GitHub link

    If you link a profile, make sure it shows maintained work. An empty profile does no harm, but a link to abandoned student projects distracts from the production systems on the CV.

Questions about the software engineer CV

How long should a Software Engineer CV be in the UK?

Two sides of A4. A graduate can use one; a principal engineer with many systems may run to a third side, but recruiters rarely read it. Keep the most recent two roles detailed and compress the rest.

Should I put my degree classification on the CV?

Yes for your first few years, especially for graduate schemes that ask for a 2:1. After three or four years of production work, the classification can go and the degree stays as a single line.

Do I need to state my right to work?

A single line saying right to work in the UK, or naming your visa type if you hold one, answers the question every employer must ask. Leave out nationality, date of birth and a passport number.

How do I show contract work on a Software Engineer CV?

List each contract as a role with the client, the dates, the scope and whether it sat inside or outside IR35. Group short contracts under one heading if there are many, and give the longest the most detail.

What technical skills should the CV list?

The languages you could be interviewed in, usually three to six, then the databases, cloud platform, infrastructure and testing tools you use weekly. Put your strongest first and make sure the bullets show you using them.

How do I tailor the CV to a vacancy?

Mirror the advert's languages and platform where they are true of you, move the closest system to the top of your current role and rewrite the profile for that team's problem. Resume Master does the rewrite against a pasted advert in about two minutes, and the keyword checker shows what the advert asks for that your CV does not say.

Related CV examples

All CV examples

Every application goes out fitting the vacancy.

Paste a vacancy, get a CV rewritten for it in about two minutes.

Tailor your CV — free

Free to start. No card. Same price on web, iOS and Android.