Full Stack Developer Resume

As an experienced full stack developer (or maybe someone just looking to further their career), a professionally formatted resume will ensure you best position yourself to find the perfect job.

This full stack developer resume guide will take you through all aspects of the resume-writing process.

If you are interested in the complete full stack developer resume template that you read, you can purchase it here.

About Full Stack Developer Resumes

You’re an experienced professional and you know what makes you different from your peers and the value you bring to companies. Although you know your strengths and are able to speak to them, it can be difficult to communicate your career story in a succinct, organized, and compelling manner when drafting a resume. You’ve envisioned and researched what your next challenge will be, however, you may find that you aren’t sure how to target your resume in order to get noticed by potential employers.

Your first step in the resume writing process is to look objectively at your career and create a narrative. What were your key achievements that got you where you are? What are your strengths and what makes you an asset to an organization’s culture? Next, research industry trends and what employers are looking for. If you are considering a move to an industry different than your current one, analyze how you can leverage your experience and accomplishments in your resume to make this transition. 

As a full stack developer, you likely have significant career progression to showcase in your resume. It’s important you show the impact you made in each role and the achievements that got you to where you are today. Highlighting your technical capabilities is a must. 

Your next step is to create a resume that highlights your strengths and distinguishes you from other candidates while conveying this information concisely and convincingly. While there are some general guidelines for professional resumes, certain industries have their own standards in terms of length, language, and the inclusion of additional information, such as publications. Our team of career advancement experts are well-versed in wading through these idiosyncrasies. They can help you navigate them and create professional resumes that will establish your brand and optimize the presentation of your experiences.

After you have reviewed this guide, you might consider using a professional resume writing service to save time that could instead be used to review job openings and build your network.

The Full Stack Developer Resume in Context

The job search can be a daunting process even for high-level professionals. It is constantly evolving in response to the growth in both technology and the workforce. To be noticed and secure an interview, you need to use a tactical approach. In addition to the strategies and research discussed here, a resume should be written so well-prepared that it will easily pass through the applicant tracking system (ATS) software, a common program used by many employers to prescreen applicants.

After you have done extensive research into the job market and gained a solid understanding of the expectations of potential employers, you can begin to strategize how you will present your past work history. It is vital to consider how an outsider might read and interpret your resume, ensuring that there is a consistent narrative written throughout. Take a look at what roles each one has played in getting you to where you are today. What were your most significant achievements? What was the value your contribution in this role brought to the company? This paints a picture in the minds of potential employers about what you can uniquely contribute to their organization. 

Compelling resumes are detailed and show a clear progression of your achievements. Your document should come across clean and concise, remembering the following stylistic guidelines that will ensure a perfect resume: 

• Aesthetic Appeal: Temporarily putting the focus of content aside, the resume should draw the reader in and look appealing. Consistent formatting and spacing throughout the document is important. 
• Eye-Catching Introduction: State what the unique value you bring to an organization is within the first few lines. This will lead the executive summary at the beginning of your resume. 
• Highlighted Achievements: Remarkable accomplishments should be discussed throughout the resume and supported by data-driven evidence that communicates the contributions of these achievements.  
• Attention to Detail: To avoid distracting the reader from the strength of your career history, ensure that your resume doesn’t have any spelling, formatting, or grammatical errors. In addition, avoiding the use of pronouns and omitting articles such as “a” and “the” will help keep the resume concise. 
• Readability: Always assume that a variety of readers will review your resume, many of who may not be in your industry. Avoid overly technical terms and be sure to spell out any acronyms the first time you use them. It may seem that everyone would know what a specific or common acronym means, but this is not always the case! 

A resume for a full stack developer should be technical, but easily read by non-technical professionals. This means it’s important that you showcase your technical abilities and expertise, but in a way that anyone can understand. 

Full Stack Developer Resume Presentation

Simple, elegant formatting is key to creating appealing and effective resumes. While you might see some fancy resume designs, they can distract from the intended impact of your resume’s content. In resume-writing, it is important to be concise. The resume should be no more than 2 pages and no more than 1000 words. The most effective and appealing resumes have relatively simple, but elegant, formatting.  

It may be tempting to make your resume flashy in the hope that it will draw more attention. Although it may attract more attention, it might not be in the way you want. This strategy can have the opposite effect. Busy hiring managers don’t have much time to review resumes and need to make an immediate decision about whether to move forward with your application. Potential employers may not be interested in your resume if it is too complicated or has unclear information.

Your resume should reflect your accomplishments. It’s important that your design is well-organized and efficient. Sought-after resumes are easy to read, but professional. Instead of displaying your achievements in a distracting design, let them shine within the document.

From an aesthetic vantage point, it’s important to keep in mind what the potential employer or recruiter may see. For this reason, it’s important to use white space strategically. Professional resumes should have a well-presented design with information that can be easily reviewed and scanned. 

Your document design should be well-organized and formatted. Use clear sections and section headings. Make job titles bold and choose clean fonts. Give concise job descriptions and highlight achievements. Avoid adding any photos, graphics, or excessive colors, as they can distract from your content. If you are looking for ways to show your creativity, direct it toward drafting your career success story and highlight why you are the best candidate through your accomplishments.

Contact Information

Your contact information is essential to ensure that an employer can reach you after a successful screening of your resume. As shown in the following example, this information should be included at the top of your resume:

These are just a few of the things you’ll notice:

• If you include your address, only your state and city should be listed. 
• You should only choose one email address. This should be your personal email, not one that is associated with your current job.
• To make it easier for employers to reach you, list your LinkedIn profile URL. This will allow you to share your brand as an established professional. 
• As an alternative method of outreach, include your phone number.

Job Title and Summary

At the top of your resume, list the job title to which you are applying, not your current job title. This resume is being created to help you achieve your next challenge, so it’s common to have to customize this section depending on the position you are applying for. In fact, ATS systems often will deduct points if the job description and your job title position do not match.

Research has shown that only a few sentences in a resume are read by hiring managers before they decide whether to review it further. This means that your opening lines must be compelling. Following the job title will be your professional summary that contains  your unique value proposition, or elevator pitch, outlining your most important accomplishments and how they have positioned you to be successful in your next role. Use descriptive language to clearly define who you are and what sets you apart from your peers.

An example UVP for a Full Stack Developer: 

Committed and driven full stack developer with deep expertise in software design and development, best practices, and Agile Scrum methodologies. 

Following your foundational UVP, create 3-5 sentences outlining key attributes. These should be unique to you, as well as align with the target role. Be sure to use active, direct language to express what you contributed and how it led to success for the organizations where you were a key player. This will help potential employers understand your skills and accomplishments that can be used to support their own organization’s growth and vision.

An example Professional Summary for a Full Stack Developer may look like the following:

Committed and driven full stack developer with deep expertise in software design and development, best practices, and Agile Scrum methodologies. Collaborative team player able to provide consistent mentorship to junior developers. Self-motivated professional with key skills in hands-on leadership, problem-solving, data structures, and technical support. Creative thinker with experience in microservices, web applications, business scalability, and test equipment. 

You may have difficulty choosing what you want to highlight in your professional summary. Review the job descriptions for your desired role and choose those that best match your language and scope. Research what companies are looking for in your targeted role and think about both hard skills that describe your abilities and soft skills that describe your personal characteristics. 

Avoid using flashy, wordy language in your resumes and use industry-specific keywords wherever possible. This will help you target your resume for the job you want and reinforce your knowledge about your industry.

Keywords

In drafting your professional summary, keywords are crucial to aligning your resume to the job you want and the industry as a whole. It can’t be said enough that even the most qualified candidates may not get pass the interview stage due to their resume not scoring high enough on the employer’s ATS. This can be avoided by optimizing your resume language. Read the job description carefully and pick the keywords and phrases that are relevant to the position.

A technical professional is expected to have certain abilities and skills,  including specific types of achievements that stand out from their peers. Below is a listing of keywords that are most common in the Full Stack Developer industry. This list should not be considered complete and should be supplemented by the information you get from the job descriptions.

Hard skills:

• Full stack development
• Interactive design
• Frameworks
• Coding
• Product demonstrations
• Test-driven development
• Production support
• Prototyping
• Back-end development
• Front-end development
• Analytics
• Software development
• Software design
• Agile methodology
• Databases
• Algorithms
• Data structures
• Technical support
• Microservices
• Web applications
• Business scalability
• Test equipment

Soft skills:

• Creative solutions
• Best practices
• Communications
• Collaboration
• Mentorship
• Leading
• Problem-solving

Areas of Expertise (Skills and Competencies) 

After you have drafted a list with keywords you want to include in the document, you can begin creating the next section by listing 6-10 bulleted areas of expertise. Make sure that these keywords are matched with the job description, as ATS systems will scan for verbatim matches. For example, if the job description mentions artificial intelligence, you should not use AI. The acronym should instead be spelled out as follows: artificial intelligence (AI). This list can also include both soft and hard skills.

After reviewing these Areas of Expertise, start brainstorming how they can be highlighted throughout your resume. If you have some data-driven, high-level achievements you want to spotlight, you can include them in a notable accomplishments section. This would follow your areas of expertise part of your resume. If these achievements are added, be sure they’re not duplicated in any other part of your resume. Keep in mind that in resumes, less is always more! 

• Designed and launched new customer-focused user interface to improve engagement and sales; enhanced experience by innovating new features and capabilities. 
• Crafted components, directives, services, and pipes with Angular CLI. 
• Synchronized applications by creating internal actions and integrating key tools. 
• Drafted code for applications to interact with APIs and web services using AJAX, XML, and JSON. 

Professional Experience

This section is the main part of the resume to expand your professional summary and describe the specifics of your career success story. Although it does include descriptions of your responsibilities position-by-position, it should be presented in a way that reflects the evolution of your career in a clear, concise way and in reverse chronological order. To avoid ageism, limit your career scope to the past 10-15 years and highlight your most recent history.

The name of the organization and the location should be listed for each position. In addition, be sure to list the number of years you have worked there (avoid using months, as it can tend to make your resume look messy), your job titles, your key responsibilities, and 3-5 bulleted achievements that highlight your contributions to the role. When drafting the bullets, try to employ the C-A-R method (challenge-action-results) to phrase them: outline the challenge, the specific actions you took to address it, and the results that were achieved. While quantifiable data may increase the impact of your role, not all roles measure results in this way. However, if you do have numbers to include, it is a good idea to incorporate them in this section.

In order to remain crisp and concise, avoid repetition by removing duplicated skills and achievements, and concentrate on the ones that would typically dazzle outside readers. You only have a few pages to share for your career story, so be sure to use compelling language and information that highlights your unique contributions. Avoid using phrases such as “responsible for,” as they don’t convey what you actually did. Instead, use action words like establish, streamline, or analyze. You should use the present tense for your current role, and the past tense for your previous roles. This will ensure consistency across all descriptions. Remember that bullets must always be written in the past tense because they refer to achievements that have already taken place.

Sometimes, it can be important to list jobs that occurred prior to 10-15 year ago, if the companies are highly relevant to your desired position. This added experience would be included in the Additional Experience section with the company name, location, and job title, but without any dates.

Education & Professional Development

Now that you have created a picture about your career history, it’s time discuss your education, and your professional development. In this section, list all of your degrees and the names of the universities you attended to achieve them. Your GPA and the year you graduated should not be included to avoid ageism. It is also important to list any professional certifications and licensures you may have in the order of significance. 

Additional Information

You might consider highlighting other sections if you have any space left. Some examples would be: 

• Awards
• Professional Affiliations
• Publications
• Languages (if relevant to the desired position)
• Volunteer/Community Service

Full stack developers have a lot of technical proficiencies. You should include them throughout the resume when possible. It may be impossible to list every technology you are knowledgeable in, so we recommend you look at the job description you are applying to. What technologies do they want? Be sure you include those in a technical proficiencies area at the bottom of your resume. 

You don’t need to list any extra information in this section, unless it is directly related to the job for which you are applying. Adding superfluous information such as hobbies can, in turn, devalue your resume, and is not a good use of valuable resume space.

Finished Full Stack Developer Resume

After you have completed your resume, it is important to look at it both from an aesthetic and holistic lens, including reviewing the details. Take a look at your document from the perspective of an outside reader and see how you would answer the following questions:

• Is the resume concise and does it quickly and succinctly describe my brand and achievements? Would I want to learn more about this person’s background?
• Is the resume confidently written using action words?
• Is the resume too long or too wordy?
• Do you see any formatting, spelling, or grammatical errors?

After completing the resume, you should have another person (preferably a peer in the industry) look over and proofread your resume. Even the most skilled writers can’t see all the nuances and errors, and you don’t want to lose your dream job over a simple mistake.

Next Steps & Our Services

See Resume Writing Packages

This guide should have given you some insight into the complexity of creating a professional and compelling resume. Many professionals, like yourself, seek help in creating a resume that is both results-driven and positions them for the next stage of their careers. A well-written resume is priceless, as it can make all the difference in getting a call back within a few weeks or many months.

PRW is a full-service, leading career advancement company that works exclusively with professionals like yourself. Our decades of experience help our clients get hired quicker and negotiate higher compensation packages. We will identify your unique talent brand and help you be the best candidate for your next job.

Buy the Full Stacker Developer Resume Template

If you’d like to build a resume yourself, but would like to use our Full stack developer template, you can download it here.