After years in the field, the challenge isn't having enough to say. It's choosing what matters to the next employer and saying it in a way that's quick to scan.
Resume: the essentials
- Two pages is fine for 10+ years of experience. Put your strongest, most recent work on page one.
- Start with a three-line summary: who you are, the scale you work at, and what you want next.
- Focus on the last 10–15 years. Older roles can be a single line each, or grouped under "Earlier experience".
- Keep the layout simple. One column, standard headings, no tables or graphics. Applicant tracking systems read it more reliably.
- Match the language of the job post. If they say "site reliability", don't only say "production support".
- Leave off your photo, date of birth, full address and "references available on request".
Impact, not tasks
Each bullet should answer: what did you do, how big was it, and what changed because of it?
Responsible for managing cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
Led migration of 140 services to AWS EKS, cutting deployment time from 2 hours to 12 minutes and infrastructure cost by 28%.
Managed a team of developers.
Built and led a 9-person platform team that shipped the payments API used by 3 product lines, with 99.95% uptime over two years.
Worked on data pipelines.
Redesigned nightly ETL into streaming pipelines on Kafka and Spark, giving analysts same-hour data instead of next-day.
Addressing the gap
You don't need to explain a layoff on your resume. If a gap grows past a few months, add a line for what you did: contract projects, certifications, open-source work, volunteering or a startup you explored with other members. In interviews, one calm sentence is enough: "My role was eliminated in a 15% reduction. Since then I've…"
LinkedIn: the parts people actually read
- Headline. Your target role and your edge, not "Unemployed". For example: "Staff Data Engineer · Streaming and lakehouse platforms · Open to full-time and contract".
- Open to work. You can show it to recruiters only, or add the public green frame. Both are fine; choose what you're comfortable with.
- About. Three short paragraphs in the first person: what you do best, two or three proof points with numbers, and what you're looking for.
- Featured. Pin a talk, an article, a GitHub repository or a case study.
- Experience. Reuse your strongest resume bullets; keep each role to three to five.
- Skills. Pin the three that match your target roles, and ask former colleagues to endorse them.
- Recommendations. Ask two or three people, and offer to write one for them in return.
A message that gets replies
"Hi Priya, we worked together on the billing migration at Acme. My role was part of last month's layoff, and I'm looking for platform engineering roles. I saw your team is hiring for an SRE lead. Would you be open to a 15-minute chat about the team, or to referring me if it looks like a fit? Thanks either way."
Short, specific, and easy to say yes to. Members in the Career transition group are happy to review your resume or headline; just post and ask.
Questions or tips to add? Members discuss this in the community groups. Share what worked for you.
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