One page is the default, and US recruiters mean it

In the US, "resume" and "CV" are different documents. A CV is the long academic record; a resume is the one-page summary that hiring managers and recruiters actually read. Job postings ask for a resume, and if you send three pages, most of it will not be read.

One page is the norm for anything up to roughly ten years of experience. Two pages are acceptable for senior and staff-level engineers with a lot of relevant work, but nobody gets extra credit for the second page. If a line does not help you get this specific job, it goes.

Leave out what a US employer cannot legally ask about and does not expect to see: photo, date of birth, marital status, nationality, full street address. City and state are enough. There is no consent clause either; the GDPR-style sentence at the bottom of European CVs looks odd to an American reader.

Write each bullet as a result, not a duty

"Responsible for developing backend services in Python" describes a job, not you. Every other candidate for the role could write the same line. A recruiter scanning fifty resumes is looking for evidence of impact: what changed because you were there.

The pattern US recruiters are trained to look for is an action verb, what you did, and a measurable outcome. "Migrated a Django monolith to four containerized services, cutting deploy time from 45 to 9 minutes" gives the scope, the technology and the result in one line. So does "Raised backend test coverage from 41% to 78%; production incidents down 30% year over year".

Numbers do not have to be revenue. Latency, requests per day, users affected, hours saved, coverage, incident counts, team size, time to ship all work. If you genuinely cannot share a figure, describe the scale in words: "a service handling millions of requests a day" still beats "a high-traffic service".

• Verbs that carry weight: designed, shipped, led, migrated, reduced, automated, scaled, cut.
• Verbs that carry nothing: helped, participated in, was responsible for, worked on.
• One result per bullet, four to six bullets for the current role, two or three for older ones.

List your tech stack so an ATS can find it

Most mid-size and large US companies run applications through an applicant tracking system such as Greenhouse, Lever or Workday. Recruiters search and filter by keywords from the job posting, and the system matches text literally. It does not know that "JS" is JavaScript or that "K8s" is Kubernetes.

Use the exact names from the posting. Keep a dedicated skills section, grouped so it reads at a glance: languages, frameworks, cloud and infrastructure, tools. Eight to twelve items you could be interviewed on today are worth more than twenty-five you touched once.

Then repeat the important technologies inside your experience bullets, attached to real work. A skill that appears twice, once in the skills block and once next to a result, is the signal both the ATS and the human reader are looking for.

Formatting that survives the parser

The parser sees your resume before any person does. A layout that looks sharp on screen can arrive in the recruiter's queue as a jumble of fragments.

• Single column with standard section headings: Summary, Experience, Skills, Education. Parsers read two-column layouts in the wrong order.
• No tables, text boxes, icons or skill bars. A row of technology logos parses as nothing at all.
• Dates in one consistent format, month and year, on every role.
• PDF is fine for almost every system today; use .docx only when the posting asks for it.
• A file name with your name and the word resume, for example Daniel_Reyes_Resume.pdf.

GitHub, side projects and links

A GitHub link helps only when there is something to see: a project with a README, commits over time, or contributions to a library other people use. An empty profile or three abandoned tutorials does more harm than leaving the link out.

For engineers with fewer than two or three years of experience, one well-described project can carry more weight than an internship. Describe it the way you would a job: the problem, what you built, the stack, and what happened. Put the link in the portfolio field so it prints next to your contact details.

LinkedIn is expected; a personal site is optional. Skip "references available on request" and the objective statement at the top. A three-sentence summary with your years of experience, core stack and one headline result does the same job better.

Common mistakes in software engineer resumes

These come up at every level, from new grad to staff engineer.

• A skills section with 25 technologies and no indication of which ones you actually work in.
• Bullets that describe duties instead of outcomes.
• Two-column templates, icons and progress bars that look good on screen and parse as noise.
• Abbreviations that do not match the posting, so a keyword filter drops the application.
• A photo, date of birth or consent clause carried over from a European CV.
• Three pages for four years of experience.
• A GitHub link to an empty profile.