Software developer CV example, from first job to senior
A software developer CV states what you built, in which stack, for how many users and what your share was. Junior CVs prove you can finish work; senior CVs prove decisions, ownership and a stronger team.1
Written 13 October 2026. CitedCV. How we write our guides
Start here: sort your work into three piles
Before choosing a template, open a plain note and write down every piece of software you touched in the last five years. Then split it. The pile decides how much space each item earns, and most developers discover that their strongest material is buried in the third pile.
- Shipped to real users: features, services, apps or fixes that customers or colleagues used. These become your experience lines.
- Built but internal: tooling, scripts, migrations, test suites. These often carry your strongest numbers (hours saved, failures removed).
- Learning work: courses, side projects, hackathons, open-source patches. Juniors keep the strongest two; seniors usually drop this pile.
- For every item in piles one and two, note four things: the stack, a scale figure (users, requests, rows, team size), the result, and your own share.
- Cross out anything you could not discuss for ten minutes in a technical interview.
What hiring teams check first
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says software developers typically need a bachelor's degree in computer and information technology or a related field, and that some employers prefer a master's. O*NET's survey of new-hire requirements for the occupation found 85 percent answering that a bachelor's degree is required. The UK's National Careers Service lists more doors: a degree, a T Level in Digital Software Development, an apprenticeship, or an IT graduate scheme that often takes any degree subject.
| What the reader checks | Why | Where it sits on your CV |
|---|---|---|
| A route into the job: degree, apprenticeship or a track record | The official profiles above name these routes | Education, or a first experience line that shows paid work |
| The languages and frameworks in the posting | Screening starts from the stack the team runs | A stack line under each role, plus a short skills summary |
| Shipped work with a scale figure | BLS lists designing, testing and maintaining programs as core duties | Two to four lines per role |
| Code or writing they can open | A quick, honest sample of how you work | A GitHub or portfolio link in the header |
| How you work with others | BLS says developers usually work on teams | Review, mentoring, incident and documentation lines |
Degree or no degree
A missing degree is not hidden by leaving out the Education heading. Put the route you did take where the degree would be: the apprenticeship standard and provider, the bootcamp with its dates, or simply your first developer role at the top of experience. In Germany a missing degree also changes the visa route; the Germany guide covers that rule in detail.
How the CV changes from junior to senior
Prospects describes a typical path: an entry-level post, often supervised; after about three years, preparing detailed specifications for programs; and senior engineers who supervise development teams and usually have at least five years of experience. The National Careers Service names the next steps as senior developer leading a team, project management, systems design, IT architecture, or consulting. Your lines should move along the same path.
| Stage | What the reader wants proved | Verbs that fit | What to cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Junior, 0 to 2 years | You finish tasks, test them and learn fast | built, fixed, tested, shipped | Course lists once you have a paid role |
| Mid-level, about 2 to 5 years | You own a feature or service end to end | owned, designed, migrated, reduced | Tiny tickets; keep only work with a result |
| Senior, 5 years and more | Your decisions held and the team got better | chose, led, set, mentored, retired | Side projects, unless they are famous or relevant |
| Lead or staff | Direction across teams and the trade-offs you made | aligned, planned, standardised | Detailed tool lists; one line of stack is enough |
Junior: proof that you can finish
A junior line has a deliverable, a check that it worked and, where true, who reviewed it. Reviewers know juniors are supervised; claiming sole ownership of a large system at month three reads as inflation.
Mid-level: proof that you can own something
Name the thing you were responsible for, its size, and the before and after. One owned service with a clear number beats six features listed by name.
Senior: proof of decisions and of people
At this stage a reader looks for the choice you made, why, and what it cost or saved, plus evidence that others improved around you: reviews, hiring, mentoring, on-call rules. If every line still describes code you typed alone, the CV reads one level lower than your title.
The stack block: one line per role
A single skills box with thirty logos tells a reader what you have heard of, not when you used it. Put a short Stack line under each job instead, and keep the top-of-CV summary to what you use now. The reader then sees recency without asking.
- Under each role: Stack: Python 3.11, Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, GitHub Actions.
- In the summary: no more than eight items, ordered by how much you use them today.
- Spell tools the way the posting and O*NET do: PostgreSQL, Spring Boot, Vue.js, TypeScript. An ATS keyword search matches strings, not meaning.
- Leave out editors, operating systems and generic office software unless the posting asks for them.
- A level in words (daily use, working knowledge) beats bars or stars, which parsers cannot read.
Recency beats length
A framework you last touched six years ago belongs only in the role where you used it. If the posting wants it, that role line is your evidence; repeating it in the summary invites a question you cannot answer well.
GitHub when most of your code is private
Most professional code lives in private company repositories, and you should never copy it to a public account. A reviewer still opens your profile, so give them something to read. GitHub shows a profile README at the top of your profile when you create a public repository whose name matches your username, with a README.md in its root that has content.
- Three lines in the README: what you build, the stack you use daily, and how to reach you.
- Links to public work only: an open-source patch, a talk, a write-up of a problem you solved.
- If nothing public exists, leave the link off the CV; an empty profile is weaker than no link.
- Choosing which repositories to pin and how private activity is displayed is covered in the Germany developer guide.
Example: one developer written at three stages
Example only. Selin Aksoy is invented; her employer, numbers and dates are placeholders that show the shape of each stage. Write your own figures, and only ones you can explain.
Junior Developer, a logistics software company, 2019 to 2021
- Built the CSV import for delivery addresses in Python and Django; 300 customer accounts used it in its first month.
- Fixed 46 bugs from the support queue in six months, each with a regression test, reviewed by a senior developer before release.
- Stack: Python, Django, PostgreSQL, small React changes, GitHub Actions.
Software Developer, same company, 2021 to 2024
- Owned the route-planning API from design to release: 9 endpoints, about 1.2 million requests a day, p95 response under 250 ms.
- Cut the nightly batch from 3 h 10 min to 40 min by moving it to queued workers (Celery, Redis).
- Wrote the onboarding guide used by the next four hires.
Senior Software Developer, a payments company, 2024 to present
- Proposed and led the split of a single Django application into three services over nine months, with no customer-facing downtime during the switch.
- Set the code-review and incident rules for a team of seven; on-call pages fell from 31 to 9 a month over two quarters.
- Mentored two junior developers, who each now own a feature area.
Read the three blocks in order: the subject of each line grows from a task, to a system, to a team. That shift, not the job title, is what makes a reader accept the senior label.
Skills table for a software developer CV
| Skill area | How to list it | A line that proves it |
|---|---|---|
| Languages | Two or three you use weekly, with years | The stack line under the role where you used them |
| Frameworks and libraries | The ones in your current stack | A feature or service built with them |
| Data | Database names and what you did with them | A migration, a query you sped up, a schema you designed |
| Testing and quality | Test types you write | Coverage added, bug rate or flaky tests removed |
| Delivery | CI/CD, release habits | Release frequency or lead time before and after |
| Collaboration | Not as a word; as evidence | Reviews, mentoring, documentation others use |
Licences, certificates and the job title
None of the official occupational profiles we read (BLS, O*NET, the National Careers Service, Prospects) lists a licence for working as a software developer. Certificates are optional extras: Prospects mentions BCS Professional Certificates and the Institution of Analysts and Programmers; cloud certificates are covered on the DevOps guide. List a certificate with its issuer and year, and only if the posting or the stack makes it relevant.
Developer or engineer
Software engineer and software developer are used for the same work in many job ads, but the word engineer is protected by law in some countries, including Türkiye and the German states. The computer engineer guide explains the rule for degree holders; if your contract says Developer, use Developer.
Applying abroad
Two country guides cover the rest: the Germany guide (Blue Card for IT specialists without a degree, German CV structure, the Ingenieur question) and the Netherlands guide (English-language teams and the sponsor requirement). This page does not repeat them.
Proof: where each statement comes from
Every page below was read on 13 October 2026. Links are under Sources.
| Statement | Source |
|---|---|
| Bachelor's degree typical; some employers prefer a master's; developers usually work on teams | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Software Developers |
| 85 percent of new-hire responses: bachelor's required; hot technology spellings | O*NET OnLine 15-1252.00 |
| Routes: degree, T Level, apprenticeship, graduate scheme; progression to senior developer leading a team | National Careers Service, Software developer |
| Entry-level often supervised; specifications after about three years; seniors usually five years or more | Prospects, Software engineer |
| Profile README conditions | GitHub Docs, Managing your profile README |
Where this page stops
- New computer engineering graduates writing their first CV: the computer engineer guide covers the degree, internships and title.
- Portfolio-led frontend roles with live links and accessibility: the frontend guide.
- Scale, APIs and database depth for server-side roles: the backend guide.
- Cloud certificates and infrastructure as code: the DevOps guide.
Next steps
- Finish the three piles and pick the four or five items that carry a number.
- Rewrite each role so its lines match your stage, using the table above.
- Add a stack line under every role and trim the summary to what you use now.
- Create or clean the profile README, or drop the GitHub link.
- Tailor the stack spelling to each posting before you send it.
CitedCV can write the CV from the projects, dates and numbers you enter, in English, Turkish or German, and keeps each line tied to the fact it came from, so a figure in the CV is one you supplied.
Questions people ask
How do I write a junior software developer CV with no experience?
Lead with your route (degree, apprenticeship or bootcamp), then two finished projects with stack, a link and a result, then any internship or part-time technical work.
What should a senior software developer CV include?
Lines about decisions you made and their effect, systems you owned with their scale, and how you improved the team through reviews, mentoring or incident rules.
Should I put my GitHub on my software developer CV?
Only if a reviewer will find something there: a profile README and at least one public project or contribution. Otherwise leave the link off.
What do I put on my CV if all my code is private?
Describe the work in the experience lines with stack, scale and result. Never upload employer code; a public README or write-up can still show how you think.
How many technologies should I list on a developer CV?
Up to about eight in the summary, ordered by current use, and a short stack line under each role for the rest.
Do I need a degree to be a software developer?
Not always. BLS says a bachelor's is typical, while the UK National Careers Service also lists apprenticeships, T Levels and graduate schemes open to any subject.
Is software engineer the same as software developer on a CV?
Often the same work, but engineer is a protected title in some countries. Use the title in your contract, and check the rules where you apply.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testerswww.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
- O*NET OnLine, 15-1252.00 Software Developerswww.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1252.00
- National Careers Service, Software developer job profilenationalcareers.service.gov.uk/job-profiles/software-developer
- Prospects, Software engineer job profilewww.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/software-engineer
- GitHub Docs, Managing your profile READMEdocs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/profile-customization/managing-your-profile-readme