Software Engineer CV for the UK
A software engineer cv for the UK pairs UK conventions with the structure, keywords, and quantified bullets software engineer hiring managers expect. In the UK the document is always called a CV, and most roles are filled through Indeed, LinkedIn, Reed, and Totaljobs. This free template gets both right and parses cleanly through local ATS.
Download Qarera's free, ATS-ready UK cv template (Word + PDF) and tailor it for a software engineer role — no sign-up, no credit card.
Free forever · No watermark · GBP metrics · UK spelling
How to adapt your software engineer cv for the UK
A strong software engineer cv from elsewhere still needs localising before you apply in the UK. These are the differences that matter.
Format & length
Two pages is the norm; one page only for early-career applicants.
Spelling
Use British spelling — organise, programme, optimise — and call it a CV, never a résumé.
Photo
Never include a photo on a UK CV — it is not expected and can introduce bias.
Work rights
State your right to work (British/Irish citizen, settled status, or visa) if sponsorship may be relevant.
Software Engineer specifics
State your right-to-work status if you need visa sponsorship — many UK tech firms filter on it.
Where employers hire
Indeed UK, LinkedIn, Reed, Totaljobs. ATS used: Workday, Taleo, and Greenhouse, widely used by UK employers.
ATS keywords for software engineer cvs
Embed these naturally into your bullets and skills section — the UK employers run the same keyword-matching ATS as everyone else.
Skills to put on a software engineer cv
Hard skills
- •Languages (Go, Python, TypeScript, Rust, Java)
- •Backend frameworks (Django, FastAPI, Express, Spring Boot)
- •Frontend frameworks (React, Next.js, Vue)
- •Distributed systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, gRPC)
- •Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB)
- •Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) + IaC (Terraform, Pulumi)
- •Containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm)
- •CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Buildkite, ArgoCD)
- •Observability (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Sentry)
- •Testing (unit, integration, contract, load) + TDD
Soft skills
- •Cross-team technical writing (RFCs, ADRs, design docs)
- •Code review at scale
- •Incident response and on-call ownership
- •Mentoring junior engineers and interns
- •Stakeholder communication (PM, design, exec)
- •Async collaboration across timezones
Sample software engineer cv bullets
Use these as a model — replace the numbers with your own, and convert any figures to GBP for the UK applications.
- 1
Led the migration of the payments service from a Python monolith to a Go microservice; cut p99 latency from 480ms to 110ms and reduced infra cost 38% across 50M requests per day.
- 2
Designed and shipped a Kafka-based event-sourcing layer used by 6 downstream teams; eliminated the nightly batch job and brought new-account propagation from 24 hours to under 5 seconds.
- 3
Owned the on-call rotation for the search platform (12 services, 4 engineers); cut SEV-2 incident rate by 62% over two quarters by introducing pre-deploy load testing and per-endpoint SLO dashboards.
- 4
Mentored 3 junior engineers and 1 summer intern through their first quarter; all four shipped a feature that hit production by month two, and two were promoted within the year.
- 5
Authored the team's RFC and ADR templates and led the migration of 18 services to OpenTelemetry; reduced mean time to detect from 14 minutes to 90 seconds across the org.
- 6
Reduced the React bundle size from 2.4MB to 480KB by route-splitting and replacing 4 heavy dependencies; lifted Lighthouse performance score from 41 to 92 on the marketing site.
Recommended structure
- 1Contact + GitHub
- 2Professional Summary
- 3Skills (grouped)
- 4Experience
- 5Projects (juniors only)
- 6Education
- 7Open source / writing (optional)
Frequently asked questions
Related templates and tools
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