Tech CV in 2026: Software, Data, and AI Roles

Tech hiring in 2026 is more competitive than at any point in the last decade. The bar for a CV that actually gets a reply is higher — recruiters expect quantified impact, a visible stack, and a portfolio link. Here is exactly how to structure a tech CV that lands interviews at strong companies.

The one-page rule still applies

If you have under 10 years of experience, your CV fits on one page. Senior engineers and EMs with 10+ years can use two. Three is for academic CVs only.

The right section order for tech

1. **Header** — name, role, city, phone, email, LinkedIn, GitHub, portfolio
2. **Summary** — 3 sentences (see CV summary examples)
3. **Skills / Stack** — languages, frameworks, infrastructure, tools
4. **Experience** — most recent first
5. **Projects** (optional but powerful) — 2–4 side projects with stacks and outcomes
6. **Education** — degree, university, year, GPA if strong
7. **Other** — certifications, talks, open source, languages

The header recruiters expect

``` Anna Korhonen Senior Backend Engineer Helsinki, FI · +358 40 123 4567 · anna@email.com linkedin.com/in/akorhonen · github.com/akorhonen · annakorhonen.dev ```

Hyperlink everything. Use plain-text URLs (no link wrapping) so ATS parses them cleanly.

Stack section — the most-skimmed part of a tech CV

Recruiters read this first. Group by category, do not list 80 random tools.

``` Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript, SQL Backend: gRPC, GraphQL, REST, Kafka, Redis Data: PostgreSQL, BigQuery, dbt, Airflow Infra: AWS (EKS, RDS, Lambda), Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions Practices: TDD, code review, on-call, incident response ```

Only list what you can defend in an interview. If you can't whiteboard the basics of Kafka, don't list Kafka.

Experience: the achievement bullet recipe

Every bullet follows the same shape:

**Verb → what you built → with what → measurable outcome.**

Strong software-engineering bullets

• "Led migration of 40-service Node monolith to typed Go microservices on Kubernetes; cut p95 latency 38% and infra spend $1.2M/year."
• "Designed and shipped event-driven payments pipeline (Kafka, Go, PostgreSQL) processing 4M txns/day with 99.99% availability."
• "Owned authentication platform serving 12M monthly users; reduced auth-related incidents 71% by introducing typed contracts and contract tests."
• "Mentored 4 mid-level engineers through promotion; ran the team's hiring loop, made 7 senior offers, all accepted."

Strong data / ML bullets

• "Built churn-prediction model (XGBoost, dbt, MLflow) deployed to production; retained $4.8M ARR in the first year."
• "Rebuilt experimentation platform on top of BigQuery; cut experiment readout time from 3 days to 6 hours, enabling 4× more tests per quarter."
• "Authored the company's first causal-inference framework for marketing measurement; adopted by 3 BU heads for quarterly budget decisions."

Strong AI / LLM bullets

• "Designed RAG pipeline over 14M-document corpus (pgvector, OpenAI, LangGraph); deployed as internal copilot now used by 600 weekly users."
• "Fine-tuned 7B open-weights model on customer support tickets; reduced average handle time 32% while raising CSAT 4 points."
• "Built evaluation harness for 8 internal LLM features; cut regression-bug escape rate 65% across two quarters."

Projects section: when to add it

• Always include projects if you're:
• A student, graduate, or junior
• Switching specialism (e.g. backend → ML)
• Applying to a senior IC role without management titles

Each project needs: name, one-line description, stack, outcome / link.

``` Linkstream — open-source RSS-to-Slack bridge Go, SQLite, Cobra · 1.4k GitHub stars, 200+ active deployments github.com/akorhonen/linkstream ```

Education

For experienced engineers, one line is enough. New grads should include GPA (if strong), relevant coursework, and any thesis or capstone.

What to leave off

• Photos, age, marital status
• Generic objective statements
• Soft-skill bingo ("team player, problem solver")
• Skill bars and percentage ratings (ATS can't parse them, and "Python 80%" means nothing)
• Out-of-date frameworks you no longer use
• Certifications you didn't actually complete

ATS for tech CVs

Every major company runs your CV through an ATS. Single column, standard fonts (Calibri / Arial / Inter), plain section headings, .docx or text-based PDF. See the complete ATS guide.

Recommended templates

• Dark Modern Software Engineer — bold tech-stack focus
• Electric Teal CTO — senior engineering leaders
• Modern Split Data Science — data and ML roles
• Slate Tech — clean default for any IC engineer

All free, ATS-tested, .docx format.