What a UK data engineering CV actually needs

Most of the data engineering CVs I see have the same problems. They are too long, they list duties instead of results, and the skills section is a wall of tools in no particular order. None of this is hard to fix. This post covers what a UK data engineering CV needs, section by section, and the mistakes that get CVs skipped.

Length: two pages

Two pages is the norm in the UK for someone with a few years of experience. One page is fine if you are early in your career. Three pages is almost always too many.

Recruiters and hiring managers skim. A long CV does not make you look more experienced. It makes the good parts harder to find.

Ways to get down to two pages:

• Cut roles older than ten years to a single line each.
• Drop degree modules unless you graduated in the last two years.
• Remove any bullet that describes a duty everyone in that role has.
• Use the space you free up on your last two roles, which are what people read.

The summary line

Start with two or three sentences at the top. Not an "objective". A summary of who you are professionally.

A good summary answers three questions: what you do, what you are strongest at, and what kind of work you want next. Keep it specific.

Weak:

Passionate data professional with a proven track record of delivering results in dynamic environments.

Better:

Data engineer with five years of experience building batch and streaming pipelines on Azure. Strongest in SQL, Python and data modelling for analytics teams. Looking for a senior role where I own the platform end to end.

The second version tells a reader what to expect before they reach the detail. The first could belong to anyone.

Impact bullets: problem, action, result

Each bullet under a role should describe something you did that mattered. The simplest structure is problem, action, result.

• Problem: what was wrong, slow, missing or at risk.
• Action: what you built, changed or decided, and the tools you used.
• Result: what happened. Use a number if you have a real one.

Numbers are useful because they are concrete. But only use numbers you can defend in an interview. If you cut a job's runtime, say by how much. If you do not know the exact figure, give a defensible range or describe the result in words. A made-up percentage is worse than no percentage.

Before and after

Before:

- Responsible for maintaining ETL pipelines and fixing data quality issues.

After:

- Rebuilt a nightly ETL job that regularly missed its 6am deadline. Moved it from a single Python script to an orchestrated Airflow DAG with task-level retries. The job now finishes before 4am and on-call pages for it have stopped.

The second version is longer, but it tells the reader what the situation was, what you did about it, and what changed. It also shows tools in context, which is far more convincing than a list.

Aim for three to five bullets per recent role and fewer for older ones. Not every bullet needs a number. Every bullet needs a result.

The skills section

The skills section exists so that a person scanning the CV, or a system searching it, can confirm you have the basics. Order it by what UK job ads ask for most, not alphabetically and not by what you enjoy most.

Reading a lot of UK data engineering adverts, the usual order of priority is:

1. SQL
2. Python
3. Cloud: Azure and AWS most often, GCP less so
4. Data modelling: dimensional models, star schemas, slowly changing dimensions
5. ETL and ELT tooling: dbt, Data Factory, Glue or similar
6. Orchestration: Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or the cloud-native equivalent
7. Databricks and Spark
8. Everything else: Git, CI/CD, Docker, Terraform, Kafka, testing

Group them under short headings so the section stays readable:

Languages: SQL (T-SQL, PostgreSQL), Python
Cloud: Azure (Data Factory, Synapse, ADLS), AWS (S3, Glue, Redshift)
Modelling and transformation: dimensional modelling, dbt, Spark on Databricks
Orchestration and delivery: Airflow, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Terraform

Only list tools you could talk about for five minutes. If a tool is on your CV, it is fair game in an interview.

UK conventions

A few things that are normal elsewhere look odd on a UK CV:

• No photo.
• No date of birth, age, marital status or nationality.
• No full postal address. City or region is enough.
• No "References available on request". Everyone assumes this.
• British spelling: "modelling", "optimise", "organisation".
• Month and year for dates. Exact days are not needed.
• A PDF named with your name, for example jane-smith-cv.pdf, not CV_final_v3.pdf.

Keep the format simple. Single column, standard fonts, no tables for layout, no icons. Multi-column designs often break when parsed by applicant tracking systems, and they rarely look better to a human either.

Common mistakes

Listing duties instead of outcomes

"Responsible for", "worked on", "involved in". These phrases describe a job description, not a person. Replace each one with what you actually did and what it changed.

A skills section that lists everything you have ever touched

Twenty-five tools in a row tells a reader nothing about where you are strong. It also invites interview questions on things you used once, three years ago. Prune it.

No sign of scale

Data engineering is about scale and reliability. Readers want to know roughly how big the data was, how many pipelines you ran, how many people depended on them. You do not need exact figures. "Tens of millions of rows a day" or "around forty scheduled pipelines" gives useful context.

The same CV for every role

A platform-heavy role and an analytics-engineering role want different emphasis. The content stays true; the ordering and the summary line change. Keep a master CV and produce a tailored version for each application.

Buzzword inflation

"Leveraged cutting-edge technologies to drive business value" means nothing. Say what you built.

Burying recent work

Your most recent role is what gets read. If it has two bullets and a role from six years ago has six, swap the attention.

A quick checklist

Before you send a CV, check:

• Two pages or fewer.
• The summary line is specific to you and the type of role.
• Every bullet has an action and a result.
• Numbers are real and you can explain how you got them.
• Skills are grouped and ordered by relevance.
• No photo, date of birth, or "references available on request".
• British spelling throughout.
• The file is a PDF with a sensible name.

Next step

Take your current CV and rewrite just the top three bullets of your most recent role using problem, action, result. In my experience that one change does more than anything else on this list.