The bullet structure
Use this sequence: owned action + difficult environment + engineering decision + measured outcome. Example: "Led deployment of a retrieval assistant across 18 support teams; built permission-aware ingestion and a 240-question regression set, reducing median answer time 38% while holding groundedness above the launch threshold." The sentence shows ownership, integration, evaluation, adoption, and a business result without calling itself forward deployed.
What to surface
- Customer-facing discovery, technical scoping, solution design, and expectation management.
- Production code, integrations, data pipelines, APIs, deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
- AI evaluations, guardrails, retrieval quality, model tradeoffs, cost, latency, and human review.
- Adoption, time saved, revenue enabled, risk reduced, uptime, quality, or another customer-owned measure.
- A decision you made under ambiguity and the option you rejected.
Before and after
| Weak | Stronger |
|---|---|
| Built a RAG chatbot using Python and a vector database | Shipped a permission-aware research assistant to 60 analysts; created retrieval evals and cut failed searches 31% |
| Worked with clients to gather requirements | Reframed a requested dashboard into an exception workflow, piloted it with two operators, and reduced manual review time 22% |
| Improved application performance | Introduced caching and model routing under a fixed budget, cutting p95 latency 41% and cost per completed task 28% |
What to remove
Remove unsupported adjectives, giant tool inventories, coursework that displaces shipped work, and bullets where the team is the only actor. Keep tools when they explain a decision or satisfy a role requirement. If your strongest story is still a hobby project, improve the evidence before polishing the wording; Build the Evidence shows how.
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