Software Engineer resume example

Software Engineer resume example for a staff engineer: a scheduler for 3M+ jobs a day, p99 latency cut 70%, design docs across 6 teams, engineers promoted.

Cover letter for this role

Ryan Castillo

Staff Software Engineer | Distributed Systems, Java and Kotlin, AWS

Salt Lake City, UT11 years of experience

Summary

Staff Software Engineer with 11 years building backend and distributed systems for field service, payments and logistics software. Designs services that handle millions of jobs a day, leads cross-team technical decisions and mentors engineers toward senior roles. Writes clear design documents and prefers simple systems that on-call engineers can understand at 3 a.m.

Experience

Staff Software EngineerMar 2021 - Present

Granite Peak Software

  • Designed the scheduling engine that assigns 3M+ field service jobs a day for 2,500 customers, built in Kotlin on AWS with PostgreSQL and SQS.
  • p99 API latency fell 70%, from 1.2s to 360ms, after I led a redesign of the job query layer and caching.
  • Wrote and drove 14 design documents adopted across 6 teams, including the company's service ownership and on-call standards.
  • Mentored 7 engineers, 4 of whom have since been promoted to senior.
  • Led the incident review program; repeat incidents dropped from 11 in 2022 to 2 in 2025.
Senior Software EngineerJun 2018 - Feb 2021

Beehive Payments

  • Built the payout service in Java and Spring Boot, handling $400M a month in merchant payouts with no reconciliation losses.
  • Moved batch settlement to an event-driven design on Kafka, reducing settlement time from 24 hours to 2.
  • Shrank PCI DSS scope to a single service by isolating card data.
Software EngineerJan 2016 - May 2018

Jordanelle Systems

  • Developed route optimization features for a trucking logistics platform used by 300 fleets.
  • Wrote the first automated integration test suite for the core API, with 500 tests running on every build.

Skills

  • Kotlin
  • Java and Spring Boot
  • Distributed Systems
  • System Design
  • AWS (ECS, Lambda, SQS, RDS)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Kafka
  • Performance Tuning
  • Technical Leadership
  • Mentoring
  • Incident Management

Education

BS in Computer Science, University of Utah, 2015

Fictional candidates and employers. Any resemblance to a real person or company is coincidental.

Now for your own experience and a real posting

Jobiko writes a resume and a cover letter from what you have actually done, for the posting you choose, and shows you both before anything is sent.

Build my resume →

What hiring managers check first

Scale and complexity

Requests, jobs or dollars processed show the kind of systems you have built.

Technical leadership

For staff and senior roles, design documents, cross-team decisions and mentoring matter as much as code.

Measured improvements

Latency, reliability or cost improvements prove impact.

Stack alignment

Put your main languages and cloud in the headline so recruiters match you quickly.

Keywords the applicant tracking system matches

  • Software Engineer
  • Staff Engineer
  • Backend
  • Distributed Systems
  • System Design
  • Java
  • Kotlin
  • Spring Boot
  • AWS
  • PostgreSQL
  • Kafka
  • Microservices
  • Technical Leadership

Use the ones that are true of you, in the words the posting uses.

Mistakes to avoid

  1. Listing every language you have used

    Focus on the few you are strongest in. Interviewers will test them.

  2. No sign of leadership

    Senior engineers influence beyond their own code. Show that influence.

  3. Describing projects without results

    Every bullet should say what changed because of your work.

Questions

How long should a senior engineer resume be?
One to two pages. With 10+ years of experience, two pages are fine if every bullet carries weight.
Should I include older jobs?
Summarize roles older than about 10 years briefly or leave them out if they are not relevant.
Do I need a GitHub profile?
It helps but is not required for senior roles. Design work and results matter more at that level.

More examples

← All resume examples