30 CV Action Verbs for Tech and Engineering Roles
"Responsible for the backend" tells a recruiter nothing. Thirty verbs that do, grouped by the thing each one proves.
Tech CVs fail in a specific way: the technology is all there, and the impact is nowhere. A bullet like *Responsible for the payments backend* tells a hiring manager your job title again, which they already read one line above.
The fix is the verb. A strong verb forces the rest of the sentence to be concrete, because you cannot write *migrated* without naming what moved, from where, and what improved.
30 verbs, grouped by what they prove
| What you want to prove | Verbs |
|---|---|
| You designed the system | Architected, Designed, Modelled, Specified, Prototyped, Scoped |
| You built and shipped it | Built, Shipped, Implemented, Delivered, Launched, Integrated |
| You improved something existing | Refactored, Optimised, Migrated, Consolidated, Hardened, Reduced |
| You made it observable or reliable | Instrumented, Monitored, Diagnosed, Debugged, Stabilised, Recovered |
| You removed manual work | Automated, Scripted, Streamlined, Templated, Orchestrated |
| You worked through other people | Led, Mentored, Reviewed, Documented, Standardised, Onboarded |
Verbs to stop using
- Responsible for: describes the job description, not you.
- Helped with / assisted: erases your contribution. Name the part you owned.
- Worked on: the emptiest phrase in tech CVs.
- Utilised: say *used*, or better, say what it achieved.
- Participated in: attendance is not an achievement.
Before and after
Responsible for improving the performance of our API and working on the database.
• Profiled and optimised the 12 slowest API endpoints and added covering indexes, cutting p95 latency from 840ms to 210ms and removing the need for a planned read-replica.
Helped with migrating our data pipelines to a new platform.
• Migrated 60+ nightly pipelines from cron-scheduled scripts to dbt on Airflow, cutting the daily failure rate from 9% to under 1% and shortening the load window by 3 hours.
The pattern
Every strong tech bullet is the same shape: verb → what you specifically did, with the technology named → the measurable result. If you cannot attach a number, attach scope: request volume, dataset size, team size, number of services.
Then make sure the verbs you choose reflect the posting you are applying to. A role that stresses reliability wants *instrumented* and *stabilised* near the top; a platform role wants *architected* and *migrated*. That is the tailoring step covered in how to tailor your CV to a job description.
Get the right verbs in front of the right posting
Paste the job link and FitMyCV rewrites your bullets using the vocabulary that specific role is asking for.
