Backend Engineer resume guide

This guide helps you tailor a Backend Engineer resume to a specific job description while keeping it clear, truthful, and ATS-friendly.

What hiring teams look for

• Designing and shipping APIs
• Reliability, latency, scaling
• System design and ownership
• Security and operational maturity

Strong resume structure

• Header (name, location, links)
• 2–3 line summary aligned to the role
• Skills (grouped, not a keyword dump)
• Experience (impact-first bullets)
• Projects (optional but powerful)
• Education / certifications (as relevant)

Skills section: what to include

• Languages: choose 1–2 primary (e.g., Python/Go/Java)
• Web: REST/GraphQL, auth, caching
• Data: Postgres/Redis/queues
• Infra: Docker, CI/CD, cloud basics
• Observability: logs/metrics/tracing

Bullet writing: the formula that works

Use: Action + Method + Result (+ Scope)

Examples:

• “Designed and shipped REST APIs serving 2M req/day with p95 latency reduced by 35%.”
• “Implemented caching and DB indexing strategy, cutting query time from 400ms to 80ms.”
• “Owned on-call improvements; reduced incident rate by 30% through alert tuning and runbooks.”

ATS and formatting notes

• Keep stack coherent; don’t list everything
• Show reliability work (alerts, SLAs, incident handling) when relevant

Common pitfalls

• Only listing endpoints you built without impact
• No ownership signals (monitoring, deployments)
• Vague “microservices” bullets with no details

Using HyperApply for this role

• Use HyperApply to focus bullets on the job’s priorities (performance vs features vs reliability).
• Related: /learn/how-to-write-star-bullets-for-your-resume