You’re not just an excellent manager—you’re also a programming expert. Whether you’re steering your team toward delivering a new SaaS platform or negotiating with key stakeholders, you’re the guiding force behind massive software projects.
Your skill set and work experience make you a highly sought-after candidate, so your LinkedIn might be overflowing with requests from recruiters. However, to score that job you really want, you should still make a cover letter and prepare a worthwhile resume.
We’re here to save you trouble and make the whole process easier. Choose a resume template from our director of software engineering resume examples, and you’ll level up your career in no time.
What Matters Most: Your Management Skills & Knowledge of Software Engineering
The skill set required to succeed in your role is diverse. Aside from your coding niche of choice, be it front-end, back-end, or full-stack, you’re well-versed in things like DevOps principles or data structures.
Besides your tech acumen, you’ve got a list of management skills to brag about. From methodologies like Agile, Scrum, or Lean Six Sigma, to managing massive budgets and juggling deadlines, you stay on top of a hectic schedule.
To highlight your ability to succeed in this role, focus on your technical skills, be it software, frameworks, coding languages, or even your proficiency in algorithms. You can express your excellent leadership later on in the cover letter.
9 most popular director of software engineering skills
- GitHub
- JIRA
- AWS/Azure
- Docker
- Jenkins
- Kubernetes
- Agile/Scrum
- SysOps/DevOps
- Selenium
Sample director of software engineering work experience bullet points
Your role revolves around tracking various KPIs. You stay on top of project timelines, track compatibility issues during new integrations, and incorporate Agile to boost productivity. All of those things make impressive talking points on your resume, so use them to make this section shine.
Focus on your career-defining achievements. Perhaps you’ve led a team of 20 engineers to deliver a $10M web app project that brought the client a 39% ROI, or maybe you’ve spearheaded an efficiency-increasing project that reduced billable hours by 31%? Mention this in your resume.
In short, talk about the times when your work made a tangible impact on the entire organization. Lastly, don’t forget to add metrics to quantify your achievements.
Here are a few ways to do this in your resume:
- Resolved app incompatibility issues with some mobile devices using AWS, reducing user-reporting incidences by 92%
- Managed cross-functional team on Jira, increasing production velocity by 23%
- Spearheaded the implementation of DevOps practices, shortening the product release cycle by 59%
- Oversaw a budget of $3M, optimizing resource allocation and cutting costs by 14%
Top 5 Tips for Your Director of Software Engineering Resume
- Express your leadership
- At this point in your career, you likely have years of management experience under your belt. To highlight that, talk about the cross-functional teams you’ve led, including the technologies they’ve dealt with, such as JavaScript or Python.
- Show off your expertise
- If you started as a software engineer and climbed the ranks to director, show that you’re still an excellent programmer. Talk about the languages and frameworks you’re proficient in, as well as the projects you delivered.
- Keep your resume up to date
- Don’t send out a cookie-cutter resume to every company you apply to. Instead, read the job description carefully and adjust your skills and work experience to match. Do this for each role; for example, if the listing calls for a director to manage both the back-end and the front-end, talk about your knowledge of Java as well as the web apps you’ve deployed.
- Highlight continuous learning
- The world of software engineering never sleeps, so show that you’re able to keep up with it and still learn new technologies. Talk about conferences and hackathons you’ve attended or were invited to present at.
- Mention the financials
- Knowing how to deliver projects in a timely manner while staying within a budget is crucial for a director, so discuss the financial side of things. Mention software projects you oversaw, such as automating testing procedures or integrating third-party APIs into a web app, and drop some financial figures.
We recommend saving your interpersonal skills for the cover letter and the interview. Focus on your knowledge of cloud platforms, networks, programming, and project management instead.
At this stage of your career, you won’t need a portfolio. Your broad knowledge of software engineering and past work experience will speak for themselves. However, if you have a personal website or repository, you should definitely include them.
Unless your career spans over 10 years, you should keep to a concise one-page resume; pick only the most relevant roles in management and software engineering.
