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Technology · Single column · ATS 5/5

Software Engineer CV template

One column, ruled headings and a stack written as prose — built to be parsed.

Engineering CVs fail in two directions — a keyword dump nobody reads, or a beautiful page with no stack on it. This family is drawn to give tooling, projects and open-source work somewhere honest to live. One column and no portrait: the plainest structure a CV can have, and the one that travels furthest across markets.

Live preview of the Software Engineer template, rendered at full page size with an example CV. The preview is the same code that generates your PDF.

The design

About the Software Engineer layout

Software Engineer is the plain-text-safe end of the technology set: no photo, no columns, no bars. Your name and role sit on the left of the header with contact details right-aligned opposite, separated from the body by a single accent rule, and each section heading is a bold uppercase line over a hairline. Skills are written out as "Languages: TypeScript, Go, Python" rather than drawn, so an applicant tracking system indexes the stack as text and a human still reads it in one pass.

Who it’s for

The readers and situations this layout was drawn for.

  • Backend, frontend and platform engineers
  • Applications submitted through Greenhouse, Lever or Workday
  • Engineers whose experience runs to two pages

Key features

What is actually different about this template on the page.

  • Split header with right-aligned contact block
  • Skills grouped by category and written as prose
  • Achievement bullets under every role
  • Project entries with technology tag rows
  • Single column with no graphics for parsers

ATS score 5/5 · Excellent

How this layout behaves in an applicant tracking system

Nothing in this layout has to be interpreted. Job titles, employers and dates are ordinary text in an ordinary order, which is what a 5 out of 5 actually means.

Headings are real headings and lists are real lists, so the boundaries between one role and the next survive extraction intact.

There is little left to fix here. If you want to see how the rest of the parser-safe range compares — and what a 5 out of 5 is actually measuring — the ATS CV templates page scores every layout on the same criteria.

Parsing checklistATS score 5 out of 5
Reading order
Single flow
Headings
Real text
Tables
None
Images
None
Selectable text
Yes

Scores are our own assessment of how a parser handles the layout — never a guarantee about one specific employer’s system.

In practice

Three situations Software Engineer is the right answer to

Templates are chosen badly when they are chosen in the abstract. Here is what sending this one actually looks like.
Case 1

A high-volume application campaign

When you are sending thirty applications in a month, the document has to work unattended. Nothing here needs explaining, reformatting or defending, which is what makes it the version to keep as your default. Where it earns its keep: Backend, frontend and platform engineers.

Case 2

Stack and shipped work

A single flow suits a CV where each role needs three or four bullets of measurable impact, and where a hiring manager will read the projects section as carefully as the employment history.

Case 3

An anonymised or blind-screening process

Public bodies and larger employers increasingly strip identifying detail before review. A layout with no portrait slot survives that process unchanged, which is one less way for your CV to arrive looking damaged. Software Engineer has no photo slot to remove, so the same file works in every market you send it to.

Make it yours

Customising Software Engineer

The template sets the structure; everything inside it is yours. Colours, fonts, spacing, section order and paper size are all controls in the CV builder, and the preview updates as you change them — nothing is applied blind.

Accent colour

Software Engineer ships with #2563eb as its accent. Cool accents — indigo, teal, slate — suit the type of document. The accent is used at small sizes on labels and rules here, so anything too pale loses contrast against white; test it before you commit.

Fonts and heading style

A clean sans keeps library names, version numbers and acronyms legible at 10pt, which is where a technical CV is actually read. Decorative heading faces make a stack list harder to scan for no gain. Heading case — uppercase, capitalised or as typed — is a separate switch, and it changes the character of the page more than most people expect.

Spacing and density

Three sliders control density — type size, line height and the gap between sections — and on a one-column page each of them affects the whole document evenly, so fitting two pages into one is a matter of small adjustments rather than deletions.

Sections and order

Skills, projects and certifications matter as much as employment. Promote projects above experience if you are early-career, self-taught or changing track — the work is the evidence in all three cases. Every section can be renamed, reordered or hidden, and Pro adds custom sections for anything the standard set does not cover.

Paper size and export

A4 or US Letter, switched in one control, with the layout re-flowing to the new page rather than being scaled to fit. The PDF is generated from the same code you see in the preview, so what you approve on screen is what downloads.

Software Engineer: common questions

Yes. It scores 5 out of 5 on our parsing checks: one column, standard headings, no tables, no text inside images and no icon fonts. An applicant tracking system reads the sections back in the order you arranged them.

Alternatives

Related templates

Other layouts worth comparing before you commit — the closest matches from Technology first, then designs with a similar ATS score from other families.

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Start your CV with Software Engineer

Open it with the example content already in place, replace it with your own, and download a PDF when it reads the way you want. Switching to another template later keeps every word you have written.

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