Practice Exercise

The Alex Park CV Challenge

A practice exercise for tech recruiters — spot the signals, the noise, and the traps.

About this CV

The CV below belongs to a fictional candidate: Alex Park, a senior backend engineer with roughly nine years of experience. It is designed to read exactly like a real CV that would land in your inbox on a normal Tuesday.

It also contains, quietly folded into the noise, almost every pattern discussed in our Medium article How to Read a Developer CV Like an Engineer, Not a Keyword Matcher: strong ownership language sitting next to weak proximity language, a skills section worth a second look, metrics with and without mechanisms behind them, an AI section where one bullet is real engineering and the rest are decorative, and a few structural anomalies that are easy to miss on the first read.

How to use this page

  1. Read the CV below as you would read any inbound candidate — quickly, the way you read on a busy morning.
  2. Note which bullets you would flag and which you would trust.
  3. Decide what hypothesis you would walk into the first call with.
  4. Head back to the article on Medium and share your call in the comments.

There is no answer key here. That is the point — reading CVs is judgment work, and the purpose of the exercise is to surface how you form yours.

The CV

Alex Park

Senior Software Engineer · San Francisco, CA

alex.park.dev@gmail.com · +1 (415) 555-0112

github.com/alexparkdev · linkedin.com/in/alexparkdev · alexpark.dev

Experience

Senior Software Engineer · Nimbus AI

Apr 2024 – Present · Remote

AI customer-support platform for mid-market SaaS companies.

  • Worked on AI-powered customer support agent using GPT-4 and RAG
  • Built retrieval pipeline with Pinecone vector store; implemented hallucination evaluation harness using GPT-4 as judge and human-labeled ground truth; reduced off-topic responses from 18% to 4% over two quarters
  • Helped deploy prompt-engineering improvements across three product surfaces
  • Participated in the architecture review board; contributed to system design discussions
  • Involved in on-call rotation for production services
Senior Engineering Manager · CloudBridge

Feb 2021 – Jul 2023 · San Francisco, CA

Led cross-functional engineering initiatives across the platform and data organizations.

  • Owned end-to-end strategy for platform modernization across multiple stakeholders, driving 10x improvement in developer productivity through cross-functional initiatives
  • Led a team through critical organizational change while maintaining delivery velocity
  • Involved in architecture decisions for the AI platform and data infrastructure
  • Partnered with product leadership to align the engineering roadmap with business strategy
  • Helped scale the engineering org
Backend Engineer · Meridian Payments

Apr 2018 – Jan 2021 · San Francisco, CA

Owned core services on the payments processing platform (PCI-regulated, ~2M transactions/day).

  • Reduced p95 API latency from 800 ms to 180 ms by redesigning primary-key indexes and introducing request-level caching on the payments write path, which carried ~40% of company transaction volume
  • Led the migration from a monolithic Rails application to three Go services; ran the production cutover across three AWS regions with zero customer-facing downtime
  • Designed and operated the alerting schema for the new services; on-call paging dropped from a median of 4 pages per week to 1 per week over six months
  • Built a PCI-compliant tokenization service handling 2M+ transactions per day; authored the security design doc that went through external audit
  • Mentored two junior engineers through their first on-call rotations; wrote the incident runbook still in use
Junior Software Developer · Polyform Studios

Sep 2016 – Jun 2018 · San Francisco, CA

First engineering role; worked on a Ruby on Rails e-commerce platform for small-business merchants.

  • Built features for a Ruby on Rails e-commerce platform used by small-business merchants
  • Contributed to front-end React components for the merchant dashboard
  • Worked with PostgreSQL and Redis
  • Participated in sprint planning and code reviews
  • Maintained 12 open-source projects on personal GitHub

Skills

Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Rust, Java, Ruby, Kotlin, Swift, C++, C#, SQL, GraphQL, REST, gRPC, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Helm, AWS, GCP, Azure, Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, Redis, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic, Sentry, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, ArgoCD, React, Vue, Next.js, LLMs, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pinecone, Weaviate, OpenAI, Anthropic, RAG, Prompt Engineering, Agile, Scrum, Leadership, Mentoring, Strategy

Education

B.S. Computer Science — State University of California

Sep 2012 – Jun 2016

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (2021)
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (2022)
  • Professional Scrum Master I (2022)
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