6 complete .docx documents written to U.S. hiring convention — single column, no tables, no text boxes, no photo, no date of birth — because a two-column résumé is read out of order by an application portal and the version a human finally sees is not the one you wrote.
Full name: Dana Whitfield
Target title: Backend Software Engineer — Payments & Billing
Contact line: Austin, TX · (512) 555-0148 · [email protected]
Links line: linkedin.com/in/danawhitfield · github.com/danawhitfield
U.S. convention: no photo, no date of birth, no marital status, no nationality. Including any of them is a defect in this market and some employers discard the file rather than risk it.
Summary paragraph: Backend engineer with six years in payments infrastructure, working mainly in Python, Go and PostgreSQL. Rebuilt a nightly billing batch into an event-driven service and took month-end close from three days to eight hours.
Core technologies: Languages: Python, Go, SQL · Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS · Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka
No 'Objective' heading — U.S. reviewers read it as an entry-level marker. State what you do, not what you want.
Current role header: Senior Software Engineer — Ridgeline Payments, Austin, TX — Mar 2021 to Present
Current role — impact bullet: Rebuilt invoice settlement as an event-driven service, cutting month-end close from three days to eight hours and ending the weekend on-call rotation for the billing team.
Current role — scale bullet: Own three production services on the checkout path, carry the primary pager one week in four, and hold p99 latency under 250 ms through quarter-end peaks.
Previous role block: Software Engineer — Kestrel Logistics, Austin, TX — Jul 2018 to Feb 2021. Built the carrier-rating API that replaced a spreadsheet quoting process used daily by the sales team.
Reverse-chronological order is expected here. Functional or skills-first layouts read as a gap being hidden.
Degree line: B.S. Computer Science — The University of Texas at Austin, 2018
Certification line: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (2024)
Coursework belongs on a new-graduate résumé, not this one. If you have none of these certifications, delete the line rather than filling it with training courses.
File name: Dana_Whitfield_Software_Engineer_Resume.docx
Opening this file: Open the .docx in Word by double-clicking it; in Google Docs go to File ▸ Open ▸ Upload and drop the file in; in LibreOffice Writer open it directly.
Format guard: Keep this document in a single column with no tables, text boxes, headers, footers or images, so an application portal reads the lines in the order you wrote them.
Send step: Export a PDF yourself before sending: in Word use File ▸ Save As and choose PDF; in Google Docs use File ▸ Download ▸ PDF Document. Upload the .docx only when the portal asks for Word.
This checklist section is a working page, not part of the résumé. Delete the whole section before you export, so the PDF contains only your résumé.
This page is the working piece. The full pack has everything below.
6 complete .docx documents written to U.S. hiring convention — single column, no tables, no text boxes, no photo, no date of birth — because a two-column résumé is read out of order by an ap
A hired résumé writer produces one document aimed at one job title; if your next application is a different discipline or a different situation, you commission and pay again. This is 6 documents covering 6 situations, kept on your
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