Resume keywords for a Software Engineer
Software engineering postings are unusually literal: they name the languages, frameworks and infrastructure they want, and a screener checks whether those exact words appear. The trap is that engineers describe work by outcome ("built the checkout flow") and leave the stack implicit, so a resume full of genuine experience reads as empty to a keyword filter.
The keywords, grouped
Languages
Frameworks and runtime
Data
Infrastructure
Practice
Check your resume against a real posting
A checklist tells you what the market asks for. Paste an actual job description and your resume to see which of these terms you are already covering and which you are not — free, and the resume never leaves your browser.
Run the checkHow to evidence these on the page
- Name the stack inside the achievement, not only in a skills list: "Cut p99 latency 60% by adding a Redis cache in front of PostgreSQL" carries three keywords and a result.
- Scale is the differentiator between mid and senior. Requests per second, rows, services owned, team size — put a number on it.
- If the posting says "distributed systems" and you have run anything with a queue and more than one service, say the phrase. Engineers systematically under-claim here.
- List the cloud you actually used. "Cloud experience" matches nothing; "AWS" matches AWS.
What gets these resumes rejected
- A skills section listing thirty technologies with no evidence of any of them in the experience bullets. Screeners cross-check.
- Describing team output as your own, or the reverse — hiding behind "we" until nothing in the resume is attributable to you.
A caution about keyword stuffing
Every term above is worth including only if it is true of you. Padding a resume with unearned keywords gets you into interviews you then fail, which is worse than not being shortlisted. Use this as a prompt to surface experience you already have and forgot to write down — not as a list to copy.