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Template Guide
Engineering resumes fail in a specific way: they list what the person was near rather than what the person changed. This page covers the layout, then works through rewriting the three bullet types engineers get wrong most often.
Preview
Modern Timeline
Who this template suits
This template fits engineers with two or more roles to show, where the shape of the career is part of the story — a progression from implementation toward design and ownership. The timeline rail makes that progression visible at a glance, which is worth something to a reviewer scanning fifty resumes for someone ready to operate a level up.
It is a weaker fit for a first job. If you have one internship and three university projects, the timeline has almost nothing to draw and the vertical rail draws attention to that emptiness. The compact one-page layout on the fresher page handles that case better by giving projects the same visual weight as employment.
It also suits engineers applying across company sizes. Startups tend to read the whole resume; larger firms often screen on skills first. Because the skills block sits above the timeline without occupying much height, both reading orders work without maintaining two versions.
Before and after
The first version names a technology and a service. The second names a change you made and what happened as a result. A reviewer cannot tell from the first whether you fixed the service or attended meetings about it.
Migrations are common enough that the fact of one says little. What distinguishes an engineer is knowing why it was done now and what it made possible. Scale (60+) makes it concrete.
The stack is the least interesting part of a side project — the interesting part is that it met real traffic and you responded to it. 'Built and ran' signals you operated it rather than shipped it once.
ATS compatibility
Skills are plain text in grouped lines, not an icon grid or a rating bar. Proficiency graphics carry no text for a parser to read, so a five-star React rating extracts as nothing at all.
The rail is drawn as a border, not as content, so it does not appear in extracted text. Dates stay in a normal text run alongside the role, which is what date-range parsers look for.
Headings use conventional wording — Experience, Projects, Skills, Education. Renaming Experience to something like 'Where I've Shipped' reads well to a human and confuses keyword-mapped screening.
Content is one column top to bottom. Two-column layouts can be linearised out of order by weaker parsers, which interleaves your sidebar into your job history.
Section by section
Two lines at most: your specialism and the scale you have worked at. 'Backend engineer, five years, payments and internal platform at 200-person fintech' does more than a paragraph about being passionate.
Group by kind — languages, frameworks, infrastructure — and list what you would be comfortable being interviewed on. Padding this list is the most common self-inflicted interview wound.
Three to five bullets for the current role, two to three for older ones. Weight toward what you designed or decided, not what you were assigned.
Include only if a project shows something your employment does not — a different stack, larger scale, or independent ownership. Two strong entries beat five thin ones.
Near the bottom once you have professional experience. Degree, institution, year. Coursework is worth listing only in your first year out.
One page through roughly five years of experience, two beyond that if the second page is full. A two-page resume with four lines on page two reads as poor editing. The constraint is useful: it forces you to drop the bullets that were only ever filler.
Only if the profile shows something. A GitHub with three forked repositories and no commits in two years is weaker than no link, because a reviewer who clicks it learns something you did not intend. If your best work is proprietary, say so in a project bullet instead.
Put it in the experience bullet where you used it, not in your skills list. Skills lists are read as a claim of working competence, and interviewers pick from them. Context in a bullet is honest and still gets you the keyword match.
Include whatever education you have, even if unrelated, and let projects and employment carry the technical case. An unexplained gap where education normally sits invites a question; an unrelated degree does not. Many engineering teams stopped filtering on the field of the degree years ago.
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Frontend Engineer
Liam Carter
Frontend engineer with 5 years building accessible, performant web interfaces for SaaS products in React and TypeScript.