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Technology · Single column · ATS 5/5

Tech Minimal CV template

Type and space only — left-aligned, tightly set, and impossible for a parser to misread.

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 Tech Minimal template, rendered at full page size with an example CV. The preview is the same code that generates your PDF.

The design

About the Tech Minimal layout

Tech Minimal strips a CV back to typography: no rules, no boxes, no coloured bands, so the only thing a reader ranks is what you have shipped. Contact details run as one dot-separated line under your name, skills read as plain comma-separated text, and roles are set compactly enough that a decade of work still fits in two pages. Because the document is a single linear column, what an applicant tracking system extracts is exactly what a person sees.

Who it’s for

The readers and situations this layout was drawn for.

  • Software engineers who dislike decorated CVs
  • Applications through a strict ATS or job board
  • Candidates compressing a long history into two pages

Key features

What is actually different about this template on the page.

  • No rules, boxes or background colour anywhere
  • Single dot-separated contact line
  • Compact role entries and inline education
  • Plain-text skills grouped by category

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.

Because there is only one text column, an extractor never has to decide which block to read first — the page has exactly one reading order and it is the one you can see.

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 Tech Minimal 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: Software engineers who dislike decorated CVs.

Case 2

Projects that carry weight

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. Tech Minimal has no photo slot to remove, so the same file works in every market you send it to.

Make it yours

Customising Tech Minimal

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

Tech Minimal ships with #111827 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.

Tech Minimal: 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.

AI Engineer

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Cybersecurity CV

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Data Scientist

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Developer

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DevOps Engineer

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Full Stack Developer

technology · two columns

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Start your CV with Tech Minimal

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.

Free plan, free download, no credit card.