What a good CV looks like
Same person. Same experience. Two very different CVs. Look at both. See what lands and what gets binned.
Marcus Bennett
Personal Statement
I am a hard-working, passionate and dynamic team-player who is also able to work independently. I am a results-driven self-starter with excellent communication skills and a proven track record of going above and beyond. I am seeking a challenging and rewarding role at a forward-thinking company where I can utilise my skill-set and synergise with stakeholders to deliver value-add solutions in a fast-paced environment. I am passionate about technology and always willing to learn new things and push the envelope to think outside the box.
Hobbies & Interests
In my spare time I enjoy going to the gym, socialising with friends, watching films (especially Marvel), reading books, travelling the world, and playing 5-a-side football on Tuesdays.
Work History
- Responsible for cloud stuff on AWS
- Was involved in a migration project
- Helped with cost saving initiatives
- Duties included writing Terraform and helping the team
- Assisted with mentoring of junior team members as required
- Worked on CI/CD pipelines
- Was responsible for Kubernetes
- Did on-call rotations
- Other duties as assigned
- Served drinks to customers
- Cleaned glasses and tables
Education
- BSc Computer Science, University of Manchester, 2016–2019, 2:1
- A-Levels: Maths (A), Physics (B), Geography (C), General Studies (B), 2014
- 11 GCSEs grades A*–C including Maths and English, 2012
- St Mary's Primary School, 2003–2009
References
References available upon request.
MARCUS BENNETT
Cloud engineer with 6 years building and scaling AWS infrastructure for fintech and SaaS teams. Cut deploy times from 45 minutes to 6. Migrated legacy monoliths to containerised microservices serving 2M+ daily users. Known for shipping clean Terraform and mentoring junior engineers into confident operators
- •Led AWS migration of payment platform serving 2M daily users with zero downtime over 6-month rollout
- •Cut monthly cloud spend by £38K (24%) by rightsizing EC2 fleet and moving batch jobs to Spot
- •Built Terraform module library adopted by 14 engineers across 3 squads, halving infra ticket volume
- •Designed multi-region failover architecture cutting recovery time from 4 hours to 15 minutes
- •Mentored 4 junior engineers; 2 promoted within 12 months
- •Rebuilt CI/CD on GitHub Actions, dropping deploy time from 45 min to 6 min for 80 engineers
- •Designed Kubernetes autoscaling that absorbed Black Friday traffic spike of 14x baseline
- •Cut P1 incidents from 9/quarter to 2/quarter through better alerting and runbook automation
- •Automated security scanning in CI pipelines, catching 200+ vulnerabilities before production
- •Built monitoring dashboards in Datadog used by 6 engineers for daily standups and incident triage
- •Scripted AWS resource tagging audit that saved 10 hours of manual reconciliation per month
- •Documented onboarding guides reducing new engineer setup time from 3 days to 4 hours
- •AWS Solutions Architect Professional (2024)
- •Certified Kubernetes Administrator (2023)
Why this one fails
- Comic Sans, photo, gradient circle. Looks like a school project.
- DOB, address, marital status. Bias bait and waste of space.
- Personal statement is 6 lines of corporate bingo. Says nothing.
- Hobbies section. Nobody cares about your 5-a-side.
- Bullets start with 'responsible for' and 'duties included'. Passive.
- Paper round from 2008. Cut everything older than 10 years.
- 'References available upon request' is filler. Bin it.
Why this one works
- Targeted title up top so a recruiter knows the role in 2 seconds.
- Profile reads like a person, not a thesaurus. Numbers do the talking.
- Core competencies in plain alpha order. ATS-friendly keywords.
- Every bullet has a verb, an action and a result. No fluff.
- Dates right-aligned. Clean. Scannable in under 30 seconds.
- One page of relevant work. Bartending in 2016 isn't on it.
- No photo, no DOB, no marital status. Not their business.