A Simple Resume Checklist for Senior Roles

1) Make your level obvious

A senior resume should answer quickly:

• What level are you?
• What do you own?
• What kind of problems do you solve?

Your headline should include specialty and scope. Example: "Staff Frontend Engineer · Design systems · Platform performance".

A resume builder makes this easy — you can edit the headline and see how it looks in context immediately. The preview shows you if it's too long, if the hierarchy works, and how it reads with the rest of your resume.

2) Add scope lines to roles

For each role, consider adding one “scope” detail:

• Team size
• Stakeholders
• Scale (users, requests, revenue)
• Constraints (compliance, latency, uptime)

Scope turns claims into believable signal.

3) Rewrite bullets as outcomes

Strong bullets start with impact:

• "Reduced LCP from 3.4s to 1.9s…"
• "Increased activation by 9 points…"
• "Cut incident rate by 42%…"

If you can’t measure it, describe a concrete outcome (quality, reliability, speed).

4) Show decision-making, not just delivery

Senior hires are judged on trade-offs. Anyone can deliver features; senior people make choices under constraints.

Include hints of decisions:

• What did you choose?
• What did you avoid?
• What constraints shaped the solution?

This doesn't mean writing a novel. One line per role is often enough: "Chose GraphQL over REST for real-time updates, despite team's REST expertise." That tells a story.

5) Reduce noise aggressively

At senior levels, noise is expensive.

Remove:

• outdated tools you don't want to work with
• weak projects that dilute the strong ones
• filler bullets without outcomes

6) Make export quality non-negotiable

Print-check your resume.

If your PDF looks "almost right," it's not right.

Final pass:

• headings align
• dates align
• spacing is consistent
• A4 output is clean

That's how you look senior before the interview starts.

A resume builder with live A4 preview eliminates guesswork. You see the exact print output as you edit — no exporting multiple PDFs to check alignment. The preview shows spacing issues, alignment problems, and readability gaps immediately. When you're ready, export to PDF or PNG knowing it will print cleanly. For more on avoiding common mistakes, see top resume mistakes. And if you're optimizing for ATS, check how to beat ATS systems.