Should an Engineering Manager CV still include a tech stack section?

Yes, but keep it short and honest. Hiring panels want to know the languages and platforms you can credibly talk about in a technical conversation, not the ones you read about once. Three to five languages, two cloud platforms, and the data and observability tools you have actually run in production. If you have not written code in three years, say so — 'Hands-off for two years; comfortable in code reviews and architecture discussions in Go and TypeScript' is more honest and lands better than padding the list.

How do I show people-management impact on a CV?

Use four levers: hires made (with pass-probation rate), promotions you owned, attrition rate (regrettable versus total), and any team-health metric you can defend. 'Promoted three engineers including one staff promotion' is concrete. 'Built a high-performing team' is not. If you have run engagement surveys, share the number and the year-on-year movement. If you inherited a team in trouble, say so and explain how you turned it round; rescue stories are some of the best evidence of management craft.

Do I need to show coding ability if I am applying for a Director role?

Director-level roles in 2026 rarely require active coding, but they do require technical judgement. Show that through architecture decisions you sponsored, technical bets you backed and incidents you led the response on. If the role you are applying for is at a smaller company (under 100 engineers), expect that you will still need to talk fluently about the codebase in interview. If it is a 500-engineer org, the bar shifts towards organisational design and platform strategy.

CV Example · Tech Leadership · UK 2026

Engineering Manager CV Example UK

Engineering Manager is a hybrid role and most CVs I read fail because they pick one side. Either they read like a senior IC who happens to manage two people, or they read like a generic People Manager who used to write code. Hiring teams in 2026 want both: shipped product outcomes and proof you grew the team. Show me the headcount you manage, the hiring you have done, the staff you have promoted, and one or two product outcomes with revenue or reliability impact. Skip the framework wars; nobody hires you because you prefer Kanban over Scrum.

By Alex · 12-year UK recruiter · Updated April 2026

Example header

Dr. James Patel · Senior Engineering Manager · 12 years · London

Personal statement / Professional summary

Senior Engineering Manager with 12 years across fintech and B2B SaaS, currently leading two squads (14 engineers, two Tech Leads) on the Payments platform at a Series D scale-up. Shipped a re-platform that took P95 transaction latency from 480ms to 110ms while supporting a 3x increase in monthly volume. Hired 11 engineers in 2025 with a 92% pass-probation rate and promoted three engineers including one staff promotion. Looking for a Director of Engineering role owning a 30-50 person organisation in a product-led business.

Bullet point examples

Strong bullets follow the same shape: action verb, specific scope, quantified outcome. Use these as patterns, not as copy-paste templates — the numbers must be your own.

Team scale and hiring

Lead two product squads totalling 14 engineers and two Tech Leads, with a £1.6m annual people budget across permanent and contract staff.
Hired 11 engineers in 2025 (5 senior, 4 mid, 2 junior) with a 92% pass-probation rate; 38% of hires came via direct sourcing through my own network.

Product and delivery

Owned the re-platform of the Payments service from a Rails monolith to event-driven services on AWS, shipping in 9 months with zero customer-visible downtime.
Reduced P95 transaction latency from 480ms to 110ms while supporting a 3x increase in monthly volume during the 2025 peak season.

People development

Promoted three engineers in 2025 including one staff-level promotion that required cross-org calibration with two other Engineering Managers.
Introduced a structured engineering career framework spanning IC and management tracks; adopted org-wide and now used in performance and pay-review cycles.

Reliability and operations

Cut on-call alert volume by 71% over two quarters by leading an SLO-tightening initiative and removing 14 noisy or duplicate alerts.
Reduced mean time to recovery from 47 to 9 minutes by sponsoring a runbook-rewrite project and introducing a quarterly chaos-engineering exercise.

Cross-functional leadership

Co-led the merchant-onboarding squad with the Head of Product and a senior PM, delivering a new self-serve flow that lifted activation from 41% to 67% in 90 days.
Sponsored the company's first internal Engineering conference, with 18 talks across two tracks and a 4.6 / 5 attendee score.

Skills section — what to list

Mirror the skills exactly as they appear in target job ads. The ATS reads this section literally — synonyms hurt match scores.

People management (squads of 8-15)Engineering hiring and interview designPerformance management and career frameworksArchitecture and technical strategyDistributed and remote-first team leadershipAgile delivery (Scrum, Kanban, Shape Up)AWS, GCP and Azure (production experience)Microservices and event-driven architecturesObservability and SRE practicesIncident management and post-mortem cultureDORA metrics and engineering effectivenessProduct partnership and roadmap planningBudgeting and headcount planningVendor and tooling decisionsCoaching and 1:1 frameworks

Engineering Manager-specific CV mistakes that get you binned

× Listing 30 programming languages and frameworks at the top — Engineering Managers are not hired on Java versus Go.
× Skipping the headcount you manage — '14 engineers across two squads' is the second-most important fact after your title.
× Confusing influence with authority — be honest about whether you owned the hire-and-fire decision or whether you 'mentored' the team.
× Using DORA metrics without context — '4 deploys per day' means nothing if I do not know your starting point or your team size.
× Forgetting promotions — getting your engineers promoted is one of the strongest signals of management quality. Name them.

Common questions

Should an Engineering Manager CV still include a tech stack section?: Yes, but keep it short and honest. Hiring panels want to know the languages and platforms you can credibly talk about in a technical conversation, not the ones you read about once. Three to five languages, two cloud platforms, and the data and observability tools you have actually run in production. If you have not written code in three years, say so — 'Hands-off for two years; comfortable in code reviews and architecture discussions in Go and TypeScript' is more honest and lands better than padding the list.
How do I show people-management impact on a CV?: Use four levers: hires made (with pass-probation rate), promotions you owned, attrition rate (regrettable versus total), and any team-health metric you can defend. 'Promoted three engineers including one staff promotion' is concrete. 'Built a high-performing team' is not. If you have run engagement surveys, share the number and the year-on-year movement. If you inherited a team in trouble, say so and explain how you turned it round; rescue stories are some of the best evidence of management craft.
Do I need to show coding ability if I am applying for a Director role?: Director-level roles in 2026 rarely require active coding, but they do require technical judgement. Show that through architecture decisions you sponsored, technical bets you backed and incidents you led the response on. If the role you are applying for is at a smaller company (under 100 engineers), expect that you will still need to talk fluently about the codebase in interview. If it is a 500-engineer org, the bar shifts towards organisational design and platform strategy.