How long should a software engineer CV be in the UK?

Two pages is the cap, even at staff level. UK hiring managers expect a tight one-pager from grads and juniors, two pages from mid-level upwards. Anything beyond that gets skimmed worse, not read more carefully. The exception is contract CVs, where you can run to three pages so each placement gets context, but only because the reader expects it. For permanent roles, ruthlessly cut anything older than 10 years to a one-line mention and protect the front half of page one for the most relevant work.

Should I list every programming language I know?

No. Pick the four or five you'd be comfortable using in an interview tomorrow and leave the rest off, or group them under 'familiar with'. I've watched candidates fail technical screens because they listed Rust and got asked about it. A focused skills section signals confidence; a wall of logos signals padding. If a language is critical to the job spec, name a project where you used it in production. That's worth ten lines on a skills bar.

Do I need a GitHub link on my software engineer CV?

Only if the GitHub adds something. An empty profile or a year of half-finished tutorials hurts you. A live profile with one or two well-documented projects, or contributions to a known open-source repo, can swing borderline interviews. If your day job is closed-source and you don't have time for side work, leave GitHub off and put a one-line portfolio paragraph in the summary. Hiring managers know good engineers don't all code at weekends.

CV Example · Tech · UK 2026

Software Engineer CV Example UK

Software engineer CVs are the easiest pile to skim and the easiest to bin. After 12 years placing developers across UK fintech, SaaS and consultancies, I can tell you what hiring managers actually do: they spend about 10 seconds scanning the first half of page one, looking for the production systems you've shipped, the scale you operated at, and the languages they need today. They are not reading a list of 30 frameworks. They want named projects, real impact, and a clear sense of how you operate inside a team. The CVs that get interviews in 2026 read like a portfolio of decisions, not a tour of every tutorial you ever finished.

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

Example header

Sarah Chen · Senior Software Engineer · 8 years · London / Hybrid

Personal statement / Professional summary

Backend-leaning full-stack engineer with eight years building payment and identity systems for UK fintechs. Specialise in TypeScript and Go services on AWS, with a track record of taking legacy monoliths apart without breaking customer trust. Most recently led the payment service rebuild at a Series C lender, cutting checkout failure rate from 4.1% to 0.6% on £40m monthly volume. Comfortable owning a service end-to-end: design, on-call, postmortems and the boring infrastructure work that keeps it standing.

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.

Owned end-to-end backend rebuild at Series C fintech

Migrated payment microservice from Node 14 to Go 1.22, cutting p99 latency from 480ms to 95ms across £40m monthly transaction volume.
Led 4-engineer team through 18-month rebuild, shipping incrementally with zero downtime windows and a documented rollback plan that was used twice in production.
Designed event-driven reconciliation system replacing a nightly batch job, removing a 6-hour reporting lag and retiring two on-call alerts.

Production reliability and on-call

Reduced Sev-1 incidents from 11 in H1 2024 to 2 in H1 2025 by introducing service-level objectives, runbooks and a weekly error-budget review.
Rewrote alert routing in PagerDuty so that the 30-engineer org went from 140 pages a month to 22, with no rise in mean time to detect.

Cross-team API design

Authored the internal REST style guide adopted across 14 services and 30 engineers, replacing three competing patterns with one reviewed contract.
Designed customer-facing webhooks API used by 600 merchants, including signed payloads and an idempotency model that has handled 11m events without a duplicate-charge incident.

Mentorship and hiring

Ran the technical screen for 90+ backend candidates, calibrated the rubric with the hiring lead, and reduced offer-to-acceptance drop-off from 28% to 9%.
Mentored two mid-level engineers to senior in 14 months through structured 1:1s, design-doc reviews and shared on-call shadowing.

Earlier role: SaaS platform engineer

Built multi-tenant background job system in Python (Celery, Redis) handling 8m jobs/day with a 99.97% success rate.
Cut AWS bill by £180k/year through reserved-instance planning, S3 lifecycle policies and right-sizing the staging environment.

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.

TypeScriptGoPythonNode.jsPostgreSQLRedisAWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3)KubernetesTerraformDockerCI/CD (GitHub Actions, CircleCI)Distributed systemsEvent-driven architectureREST and gRPC API designOpenTelemetry / observability

Software Engineer-specific CV mistakes that get you binned

× Listing every framework you've touched without context. I'd rather see four named projects than 30 logos. Hiring managers assume the list is padded.
× Hiding the scale you worked at. 'Built API' tells me nothing. 'Built API serving 4m requests/day' tells me whether you've felt the pain of production.
× Burying open-source or side projects on page two. If they show real engineering, put them under work history with the same bullet structure.
× Calling yourself 'full-stack' without naming a specialism. UK hiring managers in 2026 want to know whether you lean backend, frontend or platform. Pick one and own it.
× Skipping the 'why we changed it' line. I want to see the trade-off you weighed, not just the technology you chose.

Common questions

How long should a software engineer CV be in the UK?: Two pages is the cap, even at staff level. UK hiring managers expect a tight one-pager from grads and juniors, two pages from mid-level upwards. Anything beyond that gets skimmed worse, not read more carefully. The exception is contract CVs, where you can run to three pages so each placement gets context, but only because the reader expects it. For permanent roles, ruthlessly cut anything older than 10 years to a one-line mention and protect the front half of page one for the most relevant work.
Should I list every programming language I know?: No. Pick the four or five you'd be comfortable using in an interview tomorrow and leave the rest off, or group them under 'familiar with'. I've watched candidates fail technical screens because they listed Rust and got asked about it. A focused skills section signals confidence; a wall of logos signals padding. If a language is critical to the job spec, name a project where you used it in production. That's worth ten lines on a skills bar.
Do I need a GitHub link on my software engineer CV?: Only if the GitHub adds something. An empty profile or a year of half-finished tutorials hurts you. A live profile with one or two well-documented projects, or contributions to a known open-source repo, can swing borderline interviews. If your day job is closed-source and you don't have time for side work, leave GitHub off and put a one-line portfolio paragraph in the summary. Hiring managers know good engineers don't all code at weekends.