Course Content
How to Write a Good Resume
15 sections · 30 lessons
Annotated templates: manager and career switcher, and adapting a template
The previous lesson covered the individual-contributor ladder. The two templates here are for the paths where a summary earns its place: an engineering manager, whose title does not reveal span of control, and a career switcher, whose history points somewhere else.
The lesson ends with the part every template user needs. Templates get modified, and some changes are safe while others quietly break the page.
Engineering manager template
The document has to carry the delivery argument and the people argument at once.
Text
SARA LINDQVIST Stockholm, Sweden · sara.lindqvist@email.com · +46 70 123 45 67 linkedin.com/in/saralindqvistEngineering manager, 6 years managing, 8 years engineering before that.Currently lead 3 teams (21 engineers) building payments infrastructureat Northwind. Backend and distributed systems background; still activein design review.EXPERIENCESenior Engineering Manager, Payments Feb 2023 – PresentNorthwind Retail (e-commerce, 900 staff)3 teams, 21 engineers, 2 tech leads reporting in.• Led the payments platform rebuild across 3 teams, cutting transaction failure rate from 2.1% to 0.3% and unblocking expansion into 4 new markets that the previous system could not support.• Grew the org from 12 to 21 engineers over 18 months; hired 11, promoted 4 to senior and 1 to tech lead.• Team attrition of 5% over two years against a company average of 19%.• Introduced a written design-review process; production incidents attributable to design gaps fell from 14 to 3 per year.Engineering Manager, Checkout Mar 2020 – Jan 2023Northwind Retail1 team, 8 engineers.• Delivered the checkout redesign that cut signup drop-off from 38% to 22%, sequenced as 6 incremental releases so each change was measurable.• Rebuilt the on-call rotation and runbooks after a quarter with 40+ out-of-hours pages; reduced to under 8 per quarter within two months.• Took the team from fortnightly to daily releases by funding two quarters of deployment-pipeline work against product pressure.Tech Lead / Senior Engineer Jun 2016 – Feb 2020Northwind Retail• Led a team of 5 while remaining hands-on; built the order-fulfilment service handling ~800k orders/month.Software Engineer 2012 – 2016Halcyon SystemsSKILLSLeadership Org design, hiring, performance management, technical strategy, cross-functional planningTechnical Distributed systems, payments infrastructure, Go, Python, PostgreSQL, Kafka, AWSEDUCATIONMSc Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology 2012Why it is built this way
| Choice | Reason |
|---|---|
| A summary is included | Span of control is not inferable from a title (see Engineering manager) |
| Team size in every context line | The single most important fact about a management role |
| Delivery and people in the same bullets | Prevents reading as either a senior IC or a non-technical manager |
| Attrition figure included | The most under-used differentiating number available |
| "Still active in design review" | Retains technical credibility with engineer readers |
| IC roles compressed | Present, but not competing with management evidence |
Career switcher template
The one profile where a summary is close to mandatory, because the reader will otherwise draw the wrong conclusion before reaching your evidence.
Text
MAYA FERREIRA Lisbon, Portugal · maya.ferreira@email.com · +351 912 345 678 github.com/mayaferreira · linkedin.com/in/mayaferreiraData engineer building pipelines in Python, dbt, and Postgres. Built andoperate the clinical-trial ingestion pipeline at Meridian Labs (~2Mrows/day) since early 2025. Previously eight years as a clinical researchcoordinator — I know what this data means and why it arrives dirty.EXPERIENCEData Engineer Jan 2025 – PresentMeridian Labs (clinical data infrastructure, 600 staff)Own the trial-data ingestion pipeline: 40+ study sites, ~2M rows/day.• Built the validation layer that catches malformed site submissions before they reach the warehouse; cut downstream data-quality tickets from ~25 to 4 per month.• Cut nightly pipeline runtime from 5h 40m to 55m by partitioning by study and parallelising per-site loads, moving completion back inside the reporting window.• Designed the site-onboarding schema template used for all 12 new study sites added in 2026, replacing bespoke mappings per site.PROJECTSTrialsync — open-source CDISC format converter github.com/…/trialsync• Converts between two clinical trial data standards, a manual step that previously took coordinators several hours per study. ~40 GitHub stars, used by 3 research groups.• Python, pandas, extensive property-based tests.EARLIER CAREERSenior Clinical Research Coordinator 2019 – 2024Lisbon University Hospital• Coordinated 6 concurrent oncology trials across 40+ sites; owned data quality and regulatory submission for each.• Built the Python reporting scripts that replaced a manual Excel process, cutting monthly reporting from 3 days to 2 hours — the work that led to the move into engineering.Clinical Research Coordinator 2016 – 2019Lisbon University HospitalSKILLSLanguages Python, SQLData dbt, Airflow, PostgreSQL, pandas, SnowflakeDomain CDISC standards, clinical trial data, GCP complianceEDUCATIONData Engineering Zoomcamp (certified) 2024BSc Biomedical Sciences, University of Lisbon 2016Why it is built this way
| Choice | Reason |
|---|---|
| Summary leads with what Maya does now | Reframes before the reader reads chronologically |
| Prior career named as an asset | "I know why this data arrives dirty" is the hiring argument |
| "Earlier career" heading | Signals a deliberate transition, not a gap |
| The bridge bullet is included | The Python reporting scripts explain how the transition happened |
| Domain listed under skills | The differentiator, given equal billing with tools |
| Open-source project included | Independent evidence of engineering ability |
Adapting a template without breaking it
None of these five will fit you exactly, and they are not meant to. Templates get modified. Some elements are safe to change and some are load-bearing.
Safe to change
| Element | Notes |
|---|---|
| Font family | Any clean, widely available face |
| Font sizes | Within the ranges in Typography, spacing, and margins |
| Section order | Follow the career-stage table in Order: reverse chronology and sections |
| Section names | Among standard variants: Experience / Work Experience / Professional Experience |
| Bullet character | Round bullet or hyphen |
| Accent colour | As an accent, never as the only signal |
| Number of bullets | Within the density budget in Whitespace and the density budget |
| Adding a section | Projects, publications, talks — where genuinely warranted |
Load-bearing — change at your own cost
| Element | What breaks |
|---|---|
| Single-column layout | Parsing. The most common serious failure |
| Standard section headings | Parsers segment on these; "My Journey" may not be recognised |
| Real text | Converting anything to an image makes it invisible |
| The context line | Scope disappears and the resume reads more junior |
| Dates on every role | Absence is noticed immediately and read as concealment |
| Outcome-first bullets | The document reverts to a job description |
The three changes people most often regret
1. Adding a sidebar. Usually for skills or a photo. It converts a single-column layout into a two-column one and reintroduces every parsing risk in One column or two.
2. Removing the context line to save space. It looks like redundant text next to the bullets. It is the line that establishes scope, and without it a senior resume reads as mid-level.
3. Shrinking type to fit one more bullet. Covered in Whitespace and the density budget — it reduces how much of the resume gets read at all.
The change checklist
After any structural modification, re-run three checks: