Read this before the table
The terms below are common examples of what postings for these roles tend to name. They are not a list that any applicant tracking system (ATS) guarantees, checks for or rewards. There are many ATS products, they work differently, and vendors do not publish in detail how they search or sort resumes. The posting in front of you always beats any list, including this one.
Only claim skills you have. If a term is in the posting and you could not answer interview questions about it, it stays off your resume.
A method that works for any role
- Collect the nouns. Go through the posting and write down every language, framework, tool, platform, method and certification it names. Ignore adjectives such as "passionate" or "fast-paced".
- Mark required against preferred. Terms under "requirements" or "what you bring" come first. Terms under "nice to have" come second.
- Keep the posting's spelling. If it says "PostgreSQL", write "PostgreSQL", not "Postgres". If it says "CI/CD", use that form.
- Sort by truth. Keep the terms that describe work you have done. Cross out the rest.
Example terms by role
Use the table to know what kind of term to look for, then replace every example with the words your posting uses.
| Role | Typical hard-skill terms (examples) | Where to place them in the resume |
|---|---|---|
| Backend engineer | Languages and frameworks: Java, Go, Python, Node.js, Spring Boot, Django | Skills section, and in the experience bullet for the service you built with each one. |
| Backend engineer | Systems and data: REST APIs, gRPC, microservices, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka | Experience bullets that say what the system did and what part you owned. |
| Frontend engineer | Languages and frameworks: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Vue, Angular, Next.js, HTML, CSS | Skills section, and in bullets naming the product or screen you shipped. |
| Frontend engineer | Quality and practice: accessibility (WCAG), responsive design, Jest, Cypress, web performance, design systems | Experience bullets. These read better attached to a concrete task than alone in a list. |
| Data engineer | Languages and processing: SQL, Python, Spark, dbt, ETL or ELT pipelines | Skills section, and in bullets that describe a pipeline from source to destination. |
| Data engineer | Platforms and orchestration: Airflow, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Kafka, data modeling | Experience bullets, plus the summary if the posting's title names the platform. |
| DevOps / SRE | Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Linux | Skills section, bullets, and a Certifications section for any cloud certificate you hold. |
| DevOps / SRE | Delivery and reliability: CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, incident response, on-call, SLOs | Experience bullets that show what you automated, monitored or restored. |
| Product manager | Planning and delivery: product roadmap, prioritization, user stories, Agile, Scrum, go-to-market, stakeholder management | Summary, and bullets that name the product and the decision you made. |
| Product manager | Discovery and measurement: user research, A/B testing, OKRs, KPIs, SQL, Jira, Amplitude | Experience bullets for the methods. Tools such as SQL or Jira can also sit in Skills. |
Examples only. A real posting may name none of these, or many others.
What to watch for in each role
Backend engineer. Read for the language and for the system around it. A named database, message queue or API style is easy to leave out.
Frontend engineer. Look past the framework. Postings often name testing tools, accessibility standards and performance work.
Data engineer. If you used a different warehouse, do not swap the name. State the one you used and describe the work in terms that carry over.
DevOps / SRE. Cloud providers are not interchangeable on paper, so name the one you worked with. Reliability terms such as on-call count as keywords too.
Product manager. The terms are methods and tools more than technologies. Postings also tend to name a domain, such as payments or developer tools.
Where the terms go
- Experience bullets are the strongest place, because the term sits next to proof that you used it.
- The Skills section gives a reader one place to scan.
- The summary is the place for the role title and the two or three terms the posting stresses most.
- Certifications get their own section, with the full official name.
Use each term once or twice, in context. A block of keywords pasted at the bottom of the page reads badly to the person who opens the file.
Check your own posting
To see which frequent terms from a specific posting your resume already uses, paste both into the free ATS keyword gap checker. It runs in your browser and does simple exact-word matching, so treat its lists as a starting point.
Going further
The Tech Layoff Job-Search Kit is our own paid product, sold on Gumroad as 4 Markdown files. The kit page describes each file, the delivery method and the refund policy.