IT CV examples UK 2026: 9 templates (junior to senior)

Looking for an IT CV example that actually gets you past UK ATS filters? According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey, the UK information and communication sector employed over 1.7 million people in 2025, with vacancies regularly exceeding 60,000 per quarter. Yet recruiters at UK firms in fintech, public sector and healthcare report that the majority of IT CVs are filtered out by Applicant Tracking Systems (Workday, Greenhouse, Reed ATS) before a human ever reads them. This guide gives you 9 sector-specific UK IT CV examples — from junior developer to senior engineer to IT support — each engineered to clear ATS filters and impress UK hiring managers in 2026.

Table of contents

• What is an IT CV in the UK?
• UK IT CV rules: 2 pages, no photo, ATS-first
• Example 1: Junior software developer CV
• Example 2: Mid-level full-stack developer CV
• Example 3: Senior software engineer CV
• Example 4: IT support technician (1st/2nd line) CV
• Example 5: DevOps / Cloud engineer CV
• Example 6: Data engineer CV
• Example 7: Cybersecurity analyst CV
• Example 8: Graduate scheme IT CV (no experience)
• Example 9: Career-change IT CV (bootcamp graduate)
• Contractor IT CVs and IR35: what to add
• Right to Work and visa sponsorship signalling
• ATS keyword bank for UK IT roles
• FAQs

What is an IT CV in the UK?

An IT CV in the UK is a 2-page, reverse-chronological document tailored to technology roles (software development, IT support, DevOps, data, cybersecurity) that demonstrates both technical skills and measurable business impact. Unlike US resumes, UK IT CVs exclude photos, dates of birth and marital status (in line with the Equality Act 2010), prioritise a tech-stack-led skills section near the top, and are written to pass Applicant Tracking Systems used by UK employers such as Workday, Greenhouse and Reed ATS.

UK IT CV rules: 2 pages, no photo, ATS-first

Before we get to the examples, here are the non-negotiables for UK IT CVs in 2026:

1. 2 pages maximum — even for senior engineers with 15+ years' experience. The gov.uk Style Guide and CIPD both recommend brevity and plain English.
2. No photo, no date of birth, no marital status — these breach Equality Act 2010 anti-discrimination principles and many UK recruiters will reject CVs that include them.
3. Reverse-chronological format — most recent role first. Functional CVs trigger ATS confusion at Workday and Greenhouse.
4. Tech stack near the top — UK IT recruiters scan the first half of page 1 for keywords. Put a dedicated "Technical skills" section under your personal statement.
5. Standard headings only — "Personal statement", "Technical skills", "Work experience", "Education", "Certifications". Creative headings ("My journey") confuse ATS parsers.
6. No tables, columns, headers/footers or text boxes — Workday and Greenhouse strip these out, scrambling your content. Use a single-column layout like the SpeedCV Voltage template.
7. File format — submit as .docx unless the employer explicitly requests PDF. Reed ATS parses .docx more reliably.

Note: all 9 examples below are illustrative composites — replace company names with your actual employers and tailor metrics to your real experience.

Example 1: Junior software developer CV

Target role: Graduate / Junior Software Developer (£28,000–£35,000, per ONS ASHE 2025 data for SOC 2136).

Personal statement

Computer Science graduate (2:1, University of Manchester) with 18 months of internship experience at a UK fintech building React and Node.js applications. Contributed to a payments microservice processing four million pounds per month and reduced API response times by 32 per cent. Seeking a junior developer role at a UK SaaS company to deepen my expertise in TypeScript and AWS.

Technical skills

Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, SQL
Frameworks: React, Node.js, Express, Next.js
Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Tools: Git, Docker, Jira, GitHub Actions
Cloud: AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2 — Foundations certified)

Work experience

Software Engineering Intern | London-based challenger bank | 06/2024 – 12/2024

• Built 3 React components for an in-app savings feature used by 200k+ customers
• Reduced unit test runtime by 41 per cent by refactoring Jest fixtures
• Pair-programmed with senior engineers using Git/GitHub trunk-based workflow

Key takeaway: Quantify everything. UK recruiters at challenger banks, energy scale-ups and SaaS firms look for measurable impact even in junior roles.

Example 2: Mid-level full-stack developer CV

Target role: Mid-level Full-stack Developer (£45,000–£62,000 in London, £40,000–£55,000 outside per ONS regional data 2025).

Personal statement

Full-stack developer with 4 years' experience shipping production React/Node.js and Ruby on Rails applications across UK fintech and e-commerce. Led the migration of a legacy monolith to microservices on AWS, cutting deployment time from 45 minutes to 4. Comfortable owning features end-to-end, from Figma to production observability with Datadog.

Work experience highlights

• Reduced API p95 latency by 58 per cent by introducing Redis caching at the Rails layer
• Mentored 2 junior developers through a 6-month structured pairing programme
• Owned the SCA-compliant 3DS2 checkout handling £12M monthly GMV

For more on mid-career CV structure across all sectors, see our CV examples UK: graduate, mid-career and senior guide.

Example 3: Senior software engineer CV

Target role: Senior Software Engineer / Staff Engineer (£75,000–£110,000 in London).

Personal statement

Senior software engineer with 9 years' experience designing distributed systems at scale for UK retail and government. Led the rebuild of a logistics platform serving 1.2M parcels per day, achieving 99.97 per cent uptime. Strong opinions on type safety, observability and pragmatic architecture. BPSS-cleared for HMG work.

What changes at senior level

• Lead with scale and impact — uptime, requests per second, team size led, budget owned
• Add a "Selected technical leadership" subsection — RFCs authored, architectural decisions, hiring
• Mention security clearances if relevant (BPSS, SC, DV) — critical for Civil Service and MoD contracts
• Drop early-career roles beyond 10 years — a one-line "Earlier roles" summary is sufficient

Example 4: IT support technician CV (1st/2nd line)

Target role: 1st/2nd Line IT Support (£24,000–£32,000 per ONS ASHE 2025, SOC 3132).

Personal statement

CompTIA A+ and ITIL 4 Foundation certified IT support technician with 3 years' experience supporting 800+ users in a hybrid Microsoft 365 environment. Resolved 92 per cent of 1st-line tickets within SLA at an NHS Trust covering 4 hospital sites. Strong communicator with experience of clinical staff, including out-of-hours major incident response.

Technical skills

Operating systems: Windows 10/11, macOS, ChromeOS
Productivity: Microsoft 365, Intune, Azure AD
Networking: TCP/IP, VPN, Wi-Fi troubleshooting
Ticketing: ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice
Frameworks: ITIL 4, ISO 27001 basics

IT support roles are highly relevant across the NHS, councils and education. If you're applying within the NHS specifically, also study the values-based recruitment approach used for clinical roles — the same evidence-led STAR structure applies to digital and IT roles. For framing soft skills, see our interpersonal skills on your CV guide.

Example 5: DevOps / Cloud engineer CV

Target role: DevOps Engineer (£55,000–£85,000).

Personal statement

AWS Solutions Architect Associate and CKA-certified DevOps engineer with 5 years' experience automating CI/CD for UK SaaS scale-ups. Reduced infrastructure costs by £180,000 per year at a Series B fintech by migrating from EC2 to Fargate and right-sizing RDS. Strong advocate for SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems.

Tech stack to list (UK 2026 demand)

Category	High-demand keywords
Cloud	AWS, GCP, Azure
IaC	Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation
Containers	Docker, Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS), Helm
CI/CD	GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, ArgoCD
Observability	Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry
Scripting	Bash, Python, Go

Example 6: Data engineer CV

Target role: Data Engineer (£50,000–£80,000).

Personal statement

Data engineer with 4 years' experience building production pipelines on AWS and dbt for UK retail analytics. Designed the data platform underpinning weekly board reporting for a FTSE 250 grocer, processing 4TB of transactions daily. Comfortable with both modern (Snowflake, dbt, Airflow) and legacy (SSIS, Oracle) UK enterprise stacks.

Keywords UK ATS look for

Python, SQL, dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Spark, Kafka, AWS Glue, Redshift, data modelling (Kimball, Data Vault), GDPR compliance.

Example 7: Cybersecurity analyst CV

Target role: SOC Analyst / Cybersecurity Analyst (£35,000–£60,000).

Personal statement

SOC analyst with 3 years' experience in a 24/7 Tier 2 capacity for UK financial services clients. CompTIA Security+ and BTL1 certified. Led investigation of 140+ incidents in 2024, including a credential-stuffing campaign that affected 22 client tenants. Familiar with NCSC CAF, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS 4.0.

Must-have UK acronyms

• NCSC — National Cyber Security Centre (UK government)
• CAF — Cyber Assessment Framework
• Cyber Essentials / Cyber Essentials Plus — UK government baseline
• SIEM tools — Splunk, Sentinel, QRadar, Elastic

Example 8: Graduate scheme IT CV (no experience)

Target role: Graduate scheme — Big 4 Technology Consulting, defence digital intelligence, Civil Service Fast Stream Digital, or NHS Digital graduate programme.

Structure for no-experience IT CVs

1. Personal statement (50–80 words) — degree, target role, motivation
2. Education (move to top) — UCAS points, A-level grades, degree classification, dissertation title
3. Technical projects (replaces work experience) — GitHub URL, languages, what you built, what you learned
4. Work experience — any paid role (retail at Tesco, hospitality at Wetherspoons, Christmas temp at M&S) shows reliability
5. Activities — hackathons, university computing society, open source contributions

Civil Service Fast Stream Digital and DDaT (Digital, Data and Technology) routes specifically assess against the Civil Service Behaviours — make sure your examples can be retold in STAR format at assessment centre. If you're a current undergraduate, our UCAS personal statement guide also covers how to translate academic strengths into employable signals.

Example 9: Career-change IT CV (bootcamp graduate)

Target role: Junior Developer (£28,000–£38,000) after a UK coding bootcamp (Makers, Northcoders, School of Code, CodeOp).

Personal statement

Former primary school teacher (6 years, Outstanding Ofsted) who completed a 16-week full-stack bootcamp in 03/2026. Strong communicator, pragmatic problem solver, and collaborative pair programmer. Seeking a junior developer role at a UK organisation where my teaching skills can support knowledge sharing and graduate mentoring.

What to emphasise

• Lead with the bootcamp as Education AND as a project portfolio
• Frame transferable skills explicitly — see our interpersonal skills on your CV guide for proven UK frameworks
• Show 3 portfolio projects with live URLs and GitHub repos
• Keep prior career to 4–5 lines — focus on transferable wins (stakeholder management, deadlines, training others)

Contractor IT CVs and IR35: what to add

For senior IT roles in the UK, contracting via a personal service company (PSC) remains common — but since the 2021 off-payroll reforms, IR35 status is now determined by the end client for medium/large engagements. Make this explicit on your CV:

• State the determination next to each contract role: "Inside IR35" or "Outside IR35" — recruiters at Hays, Reed Technology and Harvey Nash filter on this.
• List the engagement vehicle — Ltd company, umbrella, or fixed-term contract (FTC).
• Day rate is optional on the CV (more often discussed at screening), but stating it shows market awareness.
• Mention SDS (Status Determination Statement) experience if you've negotiated outside-IR35 working practices — a positive signal for senior contractors.

If you're a contractor planning your exit from a current engagement, our resignation letter sample UK guide covers the wording that protects you under English employment law.

Right to Work and visa sponsorship signalling

UK employers must verify Right to Work under Home Office rules before issuing a contract. For UK and Irish citizens, no statement is needed. For everyone else, signal your status clearly on the CV header to save recruiter time:

• Settled / pre-settled status (EU Settlement Scheme) — "Right to Work in the UK: Settled status (no sponsorship required)."
• Skilled Worker visa holders — "Current Skilled Worker visa, valid to 2028. Open to transfer to a licensed sponsor." Check the gov.uk register of licensed sponsors before applying.
• Graduate visa holders — state expiry date and openness to Skilled Worker transfer.
• Avoid omitting visa context if you need sponsorship — ATS rejections at the offer stage are far costlier than upfront clarity.

UK IT applications typically also expect a 1-page covering letter alongside the CV. See our UK cover letter examples by sector for sector-matched templates.

ATS keyword bank for UK IT roles in 2026

Workday, Greenhouse UK and Reed ATS rank CVs based on keyword density and exact-match phrases from the job description. Below are the highest-signal terms by role family — include the ones that are truly accurate for you.

Role family	Hard-skill keywords	Soft-skill keywords
Software developer	TypeScript, React, Node.js, REST, GraphQL, microservices, TDD, CI/CD, AWS, Git	Pair programming, code review, mentoring, agile, Scrum
DevOps / SRE	Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GCP, Prometheus, GitHub Actions, SLO, SLI	Incident response, blameless postmortem, on-call, automation
Data engineer	Python, SQL, dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, Spark, Kafka, GDPR, data modelling	Stakeholder management, data literacy, documentation
Cybersecurity	SIEM, Splunk, NCSC CAF, ISO 27001, MITRE ATT&CK, threat hunting	Incident response, communication under pressure, reporting
IT support	ITIL 4, Microsoft 365, Intune, Azure AD, ServiceNow, Active Directory	Customer service, empathy, SLA management, escalation

Build your UK IT CV now → Start free on SpeedCV. Test it instantly with our free ATS checker or score it against live Reed.co.uk vacancies with SpeedCV Match.

What to do next

Pick the example closest to your current career stage, draft your CV in a single-column ATS-safe template (the SpeedCV Voltage template is built for tech personas), then run it through an ATS checker before you submit. For broader CV writing fundamentals across sectors, see our 10 UK CV examples by sector guide.

SpeedCV's free plan lets you build and download one ATS-tested CV at no cost. If you're actively interviewing, the £1.99 14-day pass unlocks unlimited tailoring, AI personal statements and the full premium template library. Start building your ATS-ready IT CV in under 5 minutes — try SpeedCV free today.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a UK IT CV be in 2026?

Two pages maximum, including for senior software engineers with 15+ years of experience. UK recruiters and the CIPD both recommend brevity; anything longer risks being skim-read or ATS-truncated. Use the second page primarily for older work history, certifications and education. One-page CVs are acceptable only for graduates and career-changers with limited relevant experience.

Should I put a photo on my IT CV in the UK?

No. UK CVs do not include photos, dates of birth, marital status or nationality. The Equality Act 2010 requires recruiters to avoid bias on protected characteristics, and many UK employers (including the NHS, Civil Service and most FTSE 100 firms) will discard or anonymise CVs containing a headshot before review.

Do I need a GitHub link on my UK developer CV?

For developer, DevOps and data engineering roles, yes — a public GitHub profile with at least 2–3 maintained repositories is now standard for junior and mid-level UK applications. Include it in your header alongside email, phone and LinkedIn. For IT support and cybersecurity analyst roles, GitHub is helpful but not expected; a clean LinkedIn profile matters more.

How do I get my CV past Workday and Greenhouse ATS?

Use a single-column layout, standard headings ("Personal statement", "Technical skills", "Work experience", "Education"), submit as .docx, and mirror 60–70 per cent of the hard-skill keywords from the job advert. Avoid tables, text boxes, headers, footers and images, which Workday and Greenhouse parsers strip out. Run your CV through SpeedCV's free ATS checker before applying.

What's the average UK IT salary in 2026?

According to ONS ASHE 2025 data, the median UK software developer salary is approximately £52,000, rising to £75,000+ in London. IT support technicians earn £24,000–£32,000, DevOps engineers £55,000–£85,000, and senior software engineers £75,000–£110,000 in London. Tech salaries outside London are typically 15–25 per cent lower but with significantly lower living costs.

Should I mention IR35 status on my contractor IT CV?

Yes. Since the 2021 off-payroll reforms, UK clients determine IR35 status for medium and large engagements. State "Inside IR35" or "Outside IR35" alongside each contract role — recruiters at Hays, Reed Technology and Harvey Nash actively filter on this. If you've negotiated outside-IR35 working practices and have a positive Status Determination Statement (SDS), mention it briefly to signal market awareness.

How do I signal visa sponsorship needs on my UK IT CV?

Add a one-line Right to Work statement in your CV header. UK and Irish citizens need nothing. Settled/pre-settled status holders should state "no sponsorship required." Skilled Worker visa holders should state visa expiry and openness to transfer. Graduate visa holders should state expiry and willingness to switch to Skilled Worker. Check the gov.uk register of licensed sponsors before applying to non-sponsoring employers.

How many years of experience should I list on a senior IT CV?

List the last 10 years in detail and condense earlier roles into a one-line summary at the bottom of your work history ("Earlier roles: Software Engineer at Company X, 2010–2014"). UK recruiters care most about recent, relevant impact. Listing every role from the 1990s adds noise and can trigger unconscious age bias despite Equality Act protections.