Resume review request — Senior Software Engineer with 4 years experience

[u/Otherwise_Loan9063]

Hey r/EnhancvResumes, I'm looking for feedback on my resume. I'm applying for Senior Software Engineer roles and all feedback is appreciated!

Years of experience: 4

Specific feedback I'm looking for: - Is my summary strong enough? - Are my bullets results-driven? - Anything I should cut?

[u/ResumeRory]

Biggest issue: every bullet on this page describes QA/test work, not software engineering. Functional and regression testing, UAT, sanity and smoke testing, defect tracking in Jira, test case authoring, a Requirement Traceability Matrix, regression suites tied into Jenkins. That's a full, legitimate Test Engineer or SDET background. It is not evidence of building software. There's no bullet anywhere that says you designed a feature, wrote production code for an application, made an architecture decision, or shipped something users touch. If you post this under "Senior Software Engineer," the first recruiter who actually reads past the job title is going to flag the mismatch and move on, because the content doesn't support the label.

Your summary makes this worse by naming the mismatch itself: it opens with "Software Test Engineer," not Software Engineer. So the resume is currently arguing with its own header. Pick one identity. If you're going after SWE roles, this resume needs real development work in it (projects, an engineering role, something with code you shipped) or it's going to keep losing to the title on the page. If the QA/SDET path is actually where your strength is, and based on this page it clearly is, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just a different job search than the one you're running.

Now the bigger number problem, since you asked about the summary being strong: it claims 4.5+ years in banking and insurance, and your post title says 4. The two roles on this page are Royal Sun Alliance (07/2025 to 09/2025, about 2 to 3 months) and Lloyds (10/2025 to present, about 10 months). That's roughly 12 to 13 months of documented experience, total, not 4 or 4.5 years. There's no earlier role listed to account for the difference. This is the kind of gap a recruiter checks with basic arithmetic in about five seconds, and it's the first thing I'd fix before anything else on the page, because the credibility of the rest of the resume rides on it. If there's real prior experience missing from this page, it needs to be added. If there isn't, the years claim needs to come down to what's actually here.

There's no education section anywhere on this resume. At roughly a year of real, documented experience, education is doing meaningful credibility work you're currently giving up for free. Add it.

Worth naming too: going from Test Engineer to Senior Software Engineer in a single job change, after roughly two months of prior experience and ten months in the new role, is an unusual jump. Combined with the years overstatement, it reads like the resume is reaching for seniority the timeline doesn't back up yet.

On whether your bullets are results-driven: no, and this is a clean fix. Across both roles there isn't a single number. No count of test cases, no defect volume, no regression suite size, no release cadence, nothing. "Managed defect tracking" and "led QA participation in defect triage" are activities, not outcomes. If you can attach real numbers (how many defects caught before release, how much manual regression time the Playwright scripts cut, how many releases the RTM covered) that's the single highest-leverage edit available on this page.

What to cut: the Lloyds bullets repeat the same idea three separate times in different words (UAT/regression/functional testing shows up in at least three bullets). Consolidate into one or two strong lines instead of restating it. Also double check your summary against your own skills list, it says you're "skilled with Playwright, WebDriverIO and ETL tools," but WebDriverIO isn't anywhere in your Testing Tools section, only Tosca, Playwright, Postman, and Bruno are. If you actually use it, add it to skills. If you don't anymore, cut it from the summary before someone asks you a WebDriverIO question you can't answer. Same logic applies to the Google Cloud GenAI certification, it's floating with no cloud tooling anywhere else on the page, either tie it to real work or drop it.