Fictional person and company, written as a worked example. Do not reuse the numbers.

Resume example

Software engineer

Sam Whitfield, eleven years of backend and platform work. The version of this resume that works is the one that admits what a system cost, how slow it was, and what it looks like now.

11 years Staff level 3 employers Target: Staff or Senior Backend Engineer

Sam Whitfield

Staff Software Engineer

Seattle, WA sam.whitfield@example.com +1 206 555 0198 github.com/example linkedin.com/in/samwhitfield

Summary

Backend and platform engineer with eleven years building systems that stay up. Most recently staff engineer on a payments platform handling 40 requests a second at peak, where I cut p99 latency from 1.4s to 180ms. Equally happy writing the migration, the runbook, and the test that proves it.

Experience

Ledgerline

Mar 2020 – Present

Remote

Staff Software Engineer

Led the migration of the billing service off the monolith to an event-driven design, removing a nightly reconciliation batch that had taken four hours a night since 2016.
Cut p99 checkout latency from 1.4s to 180ms by fixing two N+1 query paths and adding a read-through cache; the service now handles 40 requests a second at peak.
Took our on-call rotation from 12 pages a week to 3 by fixing three long-standing failure modes and writing the runbooks we did not have.
Mentored four engineers; two now lead their own teams.

Corvus Systems

Jul 2017 – Feb 2020

Seattle, WA

Senior Software Engineer

Built the public API and its rate limiting layer, serving 340 partner integrations with no downtime in 14 months.
Reduced infrastructure spend by 31% ($420k a year) by right-sizing instances and retiring two services nobody was calling.
Introduced trunk-based development with a 30-minute deploy; release frequency went from fortnightly to daily.

Bramble Digital

Aug 2013 – Jun 2017

Portland, OR

Software Engineer

Maintained a Rails application serving 1.2M monthly users across six third-party integrations.
Wrote the billing-path integration suite the team still runs, covering 94% of the payment code.

Education

University of Washington

2009 – 2013

B.S. Computer Science

Skills

Languages Go, Python, TypeScript, SQL, Ruby

Systems Distributed systems, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS

Practice Code review, on-call design, technical writing, mentoring

Open source

pg-replay

2022 – Present

Load-testing harness for Postgres, 900 GitHub stars

Replays anonymised production query traces; three companies have used it to size database hardware before buying it.

Certification

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

2021

Amazon Web Services

Languages spoken

English: Native
Portuguese: Professional

Why this works

Eight decisions, each visible in the document on the left.

The summary states load, not stack. 40 requests a second, p99 from 1.4s to 180ms. A technical reader takes the number first; the language list is already further down the page.
Numbers arrive in pairs. 1.4s → 180ms, fortnightly → daily, 12 pages → 3. A single figure with no baseline is a claim. A before and an after is evidence.
Cost is treated as an engineering result. $420k a year is the clearest possible argument that right-sizing is real work, and it persuades far more people than "improved cloud efficiency".
Work is described in things a non-specialist can picture. "A nightly batch that had taken four hours" lands with a hiring manager. "Refactored the ETL layer" does not.
Each entry names what still exists. "Now run without me" and "the suite the team still runs" are evidence of quality. A deadline is not.
Leadership is an output, not a title. "Two now lead their own teams" is checkable and modest. "Team leadership" is neither.
On-call is on the page. 12 pages a week down to 3 is a fact about how the team works, and it is the line most senior resumes leave out.
Skills are grouped by function, and the third group is unusual. Languages, systems, practice. Most resumes stop at the first two, which is exactly what makes a senior read like a senior.

Adapting it

If your work has no number, name the shape: requests, users, rows, deploy frequency, pages a month, people affected. Scale is a metric.
Lead with one stack. A page listing nine languages reads as a generalist, and the posting is looking for a specialist.
Once you have three roles, consider cutting the oldest. Depth is what a staff-level conversation is actually testing.

Start from this

The resume travels inside the link itself, so opening it in the builder involves no upload and no account. Replace the contact details first.

Start from this

Building the import link.

Facts about this example
Level	Staff, 11 years
Sections used	Summary, experience, education, skills, open source, certification, languages
Longest role	5 years, 4 bullets
Design	Classic, 10.5pt, ruled headings, 0.6in margins