Tech Resume Writing Guide in 2024

I wrote this post for my readers who, for some reason, can not read this story on Medium.

If you want to chat, you will find me on social networks:

1. Telegram: @ThomasStorm
2. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karentovmasyan/
3. A personal blog on Medium: blog.tovmasyan.io

While casually surfing through LinkedIn, I see more and more posts from job seekers sharing their challenges and frustrations. Indeed, in the last few years, the Tech industry made a big jump to an all-time high for compensation and open positions and, at some point, hit the bottom, resulting in performance-based and company-wide layoffs.

This has made job seekers’ lives incredibly hard. Whether the job seeker is an experienced engineer made redundant or a career starter with little experience, landing a job is a non-trivial task.

In this blog, I will leave the political and economic reasons aside and explain how to increase one’s chances of succeeding in the first step of job searching — getting a call from a tech sourcer/recruiter.

But what exactly has changed in the job market?

If I can put it in a single list:

1. Many tech companies have over-hired during the past few years and are adjusting their headcount and balance.
2. Companies were pushed to focus on operational execution instead of market growth, e.g., become profitable ASAP or earn even more.
3. Companies, therefore, invest in high-ROI initiatives.
4. These initiatives either cut costs dramatically or add and enable new revenue streams.

You may think that these reasons don’t matter to you, the job seeker. But they actually do — we can indicate that companies are looking for talents that can cut costs or increase earnings. Let’s save this and reuse it in the next section.

What does it mean to cut costs and earn more in Tech?

Two significant resources impact the cost of the operations:

1. The actual cost — anything lands here from the Cloud bill till the payment service provider fee
2. The time — employees do not work for free, and their time is the company’s money

Earning more also means new or improved revenue streams — using the existing platform to gain market share or identifying new monetization schemes. In addition, a strong engineer can invest in improving the conversion, making the existing revenue stream even more revenue-streamy.

What would a talent profile look like? The resume identifies this, so let’s break down the must-haves in the next section.

Good CV in 2024: Breakdown

Suppose I am an employer operating in wartime mode. In that case, I am looking for talent who can onboard relatively quickly (3 months max) and will start bringing value in the first month. In this case, I am looking for a profile that:

1. Has a solid understanding of the domain — understanding the business was always mandatory in Tech, but now it is vital.
2. Has matured given technology — if a company operates services written in Kotlin, there is room to explain how these services are implemented, but no time to wait until the candidate learns the new language. If the company runs the services on AWS, it will take too long for the GCP expert to get used to the new Cloud provider.
3. Has a track record of driving projects and initiatives — cutting costs means being frugal. The talent is expected to work with stakeholders and gather requirements, build a proposal, prepare and align the design, lead the execution, or implement it end to end. This means the successful candidate has strong communication, project management, and coaching skills.
4. Has the interest in what my org can offer. Hiring is expensive, and losing an overqualified and underutilized engineer is even more expensive.

Based on this, we can identify essential bits of our CV

1. Candidate’s summary showcasing their background, achievements, and future goals
2. A short but exhaustive list of technologies that the candidate is strong with
3. Experience section, covering the candidate’s duties and impact

All this has to fit one or two pages, excluding contact information like address, email, phone number, and socials. It’s challenging but doable. Let’s draft our resume!

Solid background

Before applying at Uber, I considered where I could grow professionally. Uber had the scale I was curious about, as running a service that provides value to customers in Europe is one thing, but running a service that provides value to customers worldwide is much different and way more fun.

Meanwhile, I want to ensure I have the required competencies to increase Uber’s confidence in my profile. I can do this by matching the job description with my skills (don’t lie on your resume!!!).

Suppose I have this job description randomly copied from LinkedIn:

- A passion for clean, scalable code, product feature development, and product innovation.

- Experience building, releasing, or maintaining public APIs or building developer frameworks would be advantageous.

- Experience working closely with and contributing ideas and feedback to product management and designers to help create a solution that exceeds our customers’ needs.

- Ability to collaborate with the team to solve problems, transfer knowledge, and develop overall product architecture.

- Coaching and mentorship experience.

I will then form my background this way:

Senior backend engineer with XX+ years of experience building and maintaining public APIs, leading engineering teams to success. Proactive mentor multiplying the impact of the team.

This may sound like some CringedIn-kind of content, but this background matches the expectation quite well:

1. Over 10 years of experience often indicates a senior candidate who was involved or even drove large-scale projects
2. Keywords — public API
3. Mentioning not just mentoring on its own but identifying its importance — creating impact beyond the individual

Let’s pick another example that focuses on technology:

This role is a good fit if you have…

- Have 3+ years of experience as a DevOps Engineer or similar software engineering role

- Have strong experience with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines

- Are proficient in Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

- Have experience with system troubleshooting and problem-solving across platform and application domains

- Understand automation tools and software like Ansible, Jenkins, etc.

- Have experience with on-call escalations and troubleshooting customer-facing issues

- Have experience in performing root cause analysis and service restoration in case of disruptions

- Have demonstrated the ability to introduce best practices and tools for platform stability, performance, and security

- Have proven experience in a startup or fast-paced environment, preferably with international teams

Bonus points if you

- Have a strong understanding of the broader cloud landscape (AWS, Azure)

- Have experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, etc.)

- Are familiar with programming languages like Python, Go, etc.

- Have experience with monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, etc.

- Have a good understanding of networking and security principles.

This description demonstrates the expectation that the candidate is vital in a given technology. We can form the background this way:

Multi-Cloud SRE who holds several certifications (GCP Professional Cloud Architect, AWS Certified DevOps Professional, CKA) and has XX+ years of experience. Build and maintain Cloud infrastructure used by thousands of engineers driving projects in a team of X SREs.

Note that this summary focuses more on the technology yet still identifies soft skills, such as driving teams in large-scale projects.

The following line is what we want from our future jobs. It can be:

1. I am seeking opportunities to lead complex projects with cross-functional teams
2. I am seeking opportunities to mature my skills in domain X

Pretty much any “seeking opportunities” can be used here, but ensure that your actual opportunities are what the employer provides.

Technology matching

I am not a fan of listing technologies in CVs. My 14 years in the industry have taught me that every Tech is the same.

Switching from one Cloud to another is a week in service comparison and another week in learning standard API methods and objects. Switching from one programming language to another is slightly more, maybe 3 weeks to a month.

It becomes more challenging for other technologies, such as databases, async transport tools, or computing platforms. However, this is important if you are applying for a tech-specific job. For example, if you apply for a Kubernetes administrator position, you need Kubernetes, not Nomad. If you apply for a PostgreSQL DBA position, your Oracle certification (does Oracle still have certification?) will unlikely help.

However, Tech jobs are mainly based on functions:

1. Software engineers (frontend or backend or mobile)
2. DevOps engineers or SREs or Cloud or Platform

SWEs would know the language, database, and async transport tech and have experience designing systems, including requirements gathering and trade-off analysis. DevOps/SRE/Cloud/Platform people have solid systems engineering skills with the addition of SDLC tools and cloud and container orchestration services.

It does not bring much value to call yourself a specific tech expert, like “Database expert” or “CI/CD expert”. Besides, if call yourself an expert in technology X then the interviewer will become biased, that you know everything in X, and assume you lied in your CV if you could not answer any niche question.

However, some companies use AI and recruitment tech, that is, parsing CVs for keywords. Therefore, you can add technologies as a generic list of keywords. You can add a small portion of sarcasm:

Keywords for CV parser: AWS, Python, DynamoDB, Golang, Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQS, Lambda, ECS, Kubernetes, ArcoCD, Helm, Flux, S3,

I recommend including technologies to demonstrate maturity and dive deep into the matter.

For example, you stated you know DynamoDB well, and I am assigned to interview you. In that case, I will ask questions about the Hot Shards problem, consistency, transactions, DAX, Streams, CDC, Global Tables, LSI, and GSIs. I’ll start a discussion about Single Table Design. If it’s Golang, there will be pointers, memory management, and concurrency.

This is why I prefer mentioning technologies during the interview: Tech is best served with context, and no tech is perfect. In 2024, Tech companies value engineers who can perform strong trade-off comparisons and then pick a tech.

Now, let’s move to the experience section — the most crucial section of your resume.

What we do is who we are

Tech companies look for talent who makes well-informed, data-driven decisions, is proactive, and creates impact.

But what is data-driven? What does it mean to “create impact”? Many people read this differently; for better or worse, no uniform definition of impact exists.

A while ago, I did a refactoring that improved the reliability of the internal storage platform from 98% to 99.9%. Was it a lot of work? I can’t say. Did it bring value? Indeed, because this platform was used in some business flow and improved conversion rate. Before that, I made a single-line change in the Terraform code, which saved around 300k annually on the AWS bill. My team members implemented a caching system that reduced the p99 latency of the service from 150 ms to 40.

As you can see, some metrics are engineering (latency, reliability), and some are mapped to business value (cut costs, conversion rate). This area of focus in the experience section indicates that we build and improve systems to solve business or industry problems.

A good SWE experience section can look like this:

Senior Backend Engineer at Acme Corp (01.2020–01.2024)

1. Owned the 8 services that power checkout flow

2. Led a 3-engineer refactoring project, reducing the cost of computing from 1500 cores to 600

3. Implemented public API serving 10s of millions of customers

4. Enabled new business with projected revenue of at least 200 mln USD

How we did it is a different story and is expressed during the interview. The resume should cover the primary duties with the most impactful and proud achievements.

This should be in your resume. Lastly, I will share some tips for a good resume and getting a recruiter to call you.

Common job-seeking tips

1. Avoid using the Open To Work badge on LinkedIn. It may be my perception, but this badge helps much more when it’s the candidate’s market. Clearly, now it is the employer’s market, and candidates should proactively reach out to recruiters and hiring managers.
2. Use proactive and decisive terminology — instead of “responsible,” “tasked,” use “drive”, “own”, and “lead”. This will demonstrate proactiveness at work.
3. Scan your CV with grammar tools.
4. Get your CV reviewed — especially by your friends who hire and interview people.
5. Keep growing — more on that section later.

Karen, I need to gain the skills or track record you mention in this post. What do I do?

It may seem that this post is for seniors only. However, if you are at junior or mid-level specialist, you can try this to build up your skills.

If you are employed:

1. Acquire new skills using on-the-job learning — pick a project or a tech you are unfamiliar with.
2. Ask senior peers to mentor you.
3. Learn the business and find ways to create impact at your level.
4. Invest in yourself, purchase courses, and get certified — this will help you build skills around the given technology so you can apply it at your current work.

If you are not employed:

1. Invest in yourself if your purchasing power allows you to
2. Take a step back in your career and apply for roles even if the compensation or job level is below your expectations — lower income is better than no income.
3. If you get denied based on your CV, contact a recruiter for feedback — get to know what was missing to begin the hiring process with you.

Finding a job is hard, and getting denied or ghosted by recruiters is even more challenging. I am sorry you are facing this challenging time, and I hope you stay strong. This, too, shall pass.