Engine Programmer Resume
Skills & ATS Keywords

Aim for 18 to 32 substantive entries, organized inside 6 to 8 labeled rows. Anything below 16 looks thin once you're past Junior; anything past 40 reads like a buzzword pile. Every line should resurface inside a shipped-engine bullet, a runtime pillar you owned, or a profiler capture you can talk to. Cut anything you cannot point at in a build.

C++ (17 / 20 / 23), Rendering Pipeline (DX12 / Vulkan / Metal), Job Systems, Custom Allocators, ECS / Data-Oriented Design, a named console SDK (PS5 / Xbox Series / Switch), and a profiler the team uses (PIX, RGP, Razor, Optick, Unreal Insights) are the locked must-haves. SIMD intrinsics, lock-free structures, render graphs, RHI design, hot-reload, RTTI / reflection, and asset streaming round out the supporting band. Rust, fiber schedulers, GPU-driven rendering, and platform certification (TRC / TCR / Lotcheck) separate the senior pile at AAA engine shops.

Lead with whatever you actually shipped a runtime pillar inside. UE5-derived in-house engines and proprietary console engines both read strong to engine leads, as long as the bullet names the subsystem (render graph, allocator pool, fiber scheduler, RHI layer, asset streamer) and the title that shipped on it. If you have written only Unreal plugins or Unity packages with no editor-internals work, do not call it engine programming on the file. Engine leads spot the difference inside a paragraph.

One screen above Work Experience, directly beneath the Profile Summary. Engine leads scan top-down inside the first eight seconds and several ATS parsers reward keyword position over keyword frequency. A C++ token or a console SDK name buried at the bottom of page two ranks lower than the same token in your Profile Summary and your top Skills row. Hold the block to 6 to 8 labeled rows, then prove each row inside the engine-runtime bullets that follow.

Engine Programmer lives in the runtime: ECS, allocators, the job system, the rendering hardware interface, asset streaming, platform abstraction, the editor framework, and reflection. Game Developer sits in gameplay code: combat, traversal, AI, UI, inventory, save / load. Graphics Engineer owns shaders, lighting, post-processing, GPU-driven rendering, and the renderer's internals (and overlaps with Engine Programmer on rendering pipeline depth). Technical Artist sits between Art and Engineering on pipelines, look-dev shaders, and content tooling. If your week is spent in custom allocators, fiber schedulers, RHI design, and PIX / Razor captures, this is your page.

Pull six engine-team postings inside the studio tier and platform mix you are targeting (AAA console engine team, modified Unreal at a publisher-owned studio, mobile-first engine, simulation / training runtime). Mark every subsystem, language standard, console SDK, profiler, and physics middleware that recurs in three or more of them. That overlap is the core your file has to carry. Reconcile against your Skills rows and your shipped-engine bullets, fill the honest gaps in both, then pass it through an ATS Checker before you hit submit.

Yes, NDA permitting. An Engine Programmer resume that names the engine (proprietary, UE5-derived in-house, modified Unity HDRP, in-house simulation runtime), the title that shipped on it, the runtime pillar you owned, and the console platform reads as senior in one paragraph. A resume that lists C++, SIMD, allocators, and fiber schedulers with no engine and no shipped title reads as a coursework file. If the engine is unnamed by policy, describe its class (cross-platform AAA, proprietary console-first, mobile-first), the platform stack, and the subsystem owned.