Frontend Developer CV Example & Writing Guide

The full CV example

Read the experience section first. Every performance claim in it names the page it was measured on, which is what makes it answerable in an interview.

Fictional example. Replace the name, city, email, phone and portfolio link with your own.

Why this CV works

Five decisions in this example that a typical frontend CV does not make:

• The headline names a surface, not a framework

  "Frontend Developer - performance and design systems" tells a hiring manager which of their problems this person has already solved. "React Developer" tells them only which library the last team chose, and the next team may have chosen a different one.

• Every speed claim says where it was measured

  "Improved page speed" is not checkable. "Largest Contentful Paint on the product listing page, 4.1 s to 1.6 s at the 75th percentile" names the metric, the page and the percentile, so an interviewer can ask what the review widget was doing and get a real answer.

• Accessibility appears as work, not as a value

  The CV does not say the candidate cares about accessibility. It says an audit found the delivery-slot picker unusable by keyboard and that the rewrite cleared the criteria the audit listed. One of those sentences can be verified in an interview.

• The design system is measured by adoption

  Anyone can publish a component library. Four teams importing it and 900 lines of duplicated CSS disappearing is the evidence that the components were good enough to use, which is the only thing a component library is for.

• The agency years are compressed to one line

  Two years of campaign sites become a single bullet about ownership and handover. The space saved goes to the work that resembles the next job, which is how this CV stays at two pages while still showing where the career started.

Professional summary examples

Entry level

Without years behind you, name the one component or page you genuinely owned. Do not claim a performance win from a project you watched someone else deliver.

Mid level

Mid-level is where one hard number belongs. Two sentences of evidence, one sentence saying what you are reliable at.

Senior

Senior summaries describe the standard you set for other people's code. The last sentence names the situation you want, which filters out the roles you would leave in a year.

Experience bullet examples

Twelve bullets in weak and strong form. The numbers are the example character's own - yours have to come from your own Lighthouse runs, your own bundle analyser and your own audit reports, or the first interview question will end the conversation.

Weak

Improved website performance.

Stronger

Cut Largest Contentful Paint on the product listing page from 4.1 s to 1.6 s at the 75th percentile by deferring the review widget and inlining critical CSS.

Why

Name the metric, the page and the two changes. Performance work is only believable at that resolution.

Weak

Optimised the JavaScript bundle.

Stronger

Removed 310 KB of gzipped JavaScript from the initial bundle by route-splitting the account area and dropping a date library used in two places.

Why

Gzipped or not is the difference between a real number and a flattering one. Say which.

Weak

Made the site responsive.

Stronger

Rebuilt the category grid on container queries, which removed 14 breakpoint-specific overrides and fixed the layout inside the 320 px sidebar it was never designed for.

Why

Responsive is assumed. The technique and the override count are what make this a decision.

Weak

Worked on accessibility.

Stronger

Rebuilt the delivery-slot picker after an audit found it unusable by keyboard; the rewrite clears every WCAG 2.2 AA criterion the audit listed.

Why

An audit finding is external evidence. "Followed accessibility best practices" is self-assessment.

Weak

Built reusable components.

Stronger

Published 24 components with Storybook documentation; four teams adopted them and 900 lines of duplicated CSS were deleted.

Why

Adoption by teams you do not control is the only proof a library was worth building.

Weak

Used React and TypeScript.

Stronger

Typed the API layer end to end, turning a class of runtime errors in the checkout flow into build failures; the flow's client-side error rate fell from 0.9% to 0.2%.

Why

The language goes inside the outcome. On its own it is a keyword, not a claim.

Weak

Fixed layout issues.

Stronger

Cut cumulative layout shift on category pages from 0.24 to 0.02 by reserving space for the promotional banner and preloading the display font.

Why

Layout shift has a number. Use it rather than describing the jump in words.

Weak

Wrote tests for the frontend.

Stronger

Covered the six checkout steps with Playwright tests that run on every pull request, which caught 9 regressions in the first quarter before they reached staging.

Why

Count the regressions caught, not the tests written. Nobody funds test count.

Weak

Collaborated with designers.

Stronger

Replaced hard-coded colours with 40 design tokens generated from the Figma library, so a palette change ships in one pull request instead of eleven.

Why

Naming the mechanism shows the collaboration produced something, rather than describing meetings.

Weak

Improved page load speed for mobile users.

Stronger

Moved article pages to server rendering with hydration on interaction, bringing Interaction to Next Paint under 200 ms on mid-range Android phones.

Why

Name the device class. A metric measured on a developer laptop is not the one users experience.

Weak

Migrated the legacy frontend.

Stronger

Moved 38 jQuery templates to the component library one route at a time behind a feature flag, with the old page one config change away for the whole migration.

Why

The rollback plan is the part that tells a reader you have done this in production.

Weak

Worked with third-party scripts.

Stronger

Replaced a consent script that blocked rendering for 1.2 s with a self-hosted version loaded after first paint, which alone moved the homepage into the passing range for Core Web Vitals.

Why

Third-party weight is the frontend problem everyone inherits. Saying what you removed is more convincing than saying what you built.

Skills that belong on this CV

Education and certifications

A computer science or software engineering degree helps for the first job and fades fast; frontend is one of the areas where self-taught and bootcamp routes are common and unremarkable. After the second role, put education below experience and keep it to degree, school and years. If you came through a bootcamp, name it in one line and spend the reclaimed space on two projects with live URLs.

Certifications

• No certification is expected for frontend work - There is no equivalent of the cloud certificates here. A live site with a measurable improvement is the credential.
• IAAP CPACC or WAS (accessibility) - Worth listing only for roles that name accessibility in the advert, typically public sector or regulated sites.

If you have nothing to put here, delete the section. An empty certifications heading draws attention to the absence.

How an ATS reads this CV

Appliora's ATS Checker runs 14 checks against an uploaded file and shows you the text its own parser extracted. Four of them catch the mistakes frontend CVs make more than any other engineering role, because frontend developers are the ones most tempted to design their own.

• A real text layer

  A CV laid out in Figma or Sketch and exported with text converted to outlines contains no text at all: it is a picture of a CV. The checker shows what its parser extracted, so an empty or near-empty result tells you immediately. Export from a tool that keeps a text layer, or build the CV somewhere that does.

• Reading order

  Frontend developers gravitate to two-column layouts with the stack and the portfolio links in a narrow sidebar. When a parser reads across the page rather than down each column, those sidebar fragments land interleaved with your job titles. Read the extracted text in order and check that your 2023 role is still one block.

• Contact details

  A portfolio link rendered as an icon with no visible URL disappears on extraction, and a portfolio is the one artefact a frontend candidate most wants opened. Write the address as text. The same applies to a GitHub profile shown only as a logo.

• Format traps

  Skill rating bars, icon fonts and text set inside an SVG illustration are invisible to a parser and common in the free templates aimed at developers. A bar that shows React at four stars out of five also tells a human nothing they can act on, so the loss is not only mechanical.

Templates that suit this role

• ATS Structured

  Single column with conventional headings, so a portfolio URL and a bundle-size figure both survive extraction. The safest choice for a large company's application portal.

• Tech Stack

  Puts the stack in a full-width block rather than a sidebar, which keeps the framework keywords parseable while still letting a human scan them first.

• Creative Portfolio

  For frontend roles where the work is the argument: room for three projects with live URLs next to the experience, useful when you apply by email rather than through a portal.

• Swiss One Page

  A disciplined one-page layout for developers with under four years, where a second page would be filled with coursework.

Related roles

• Full Stack Developer
• Software Engineer
• Backend Developer
• QA Engineer