Resume Keywords by Role — A Cheatsheet for the Most Common Tech and Business Profiles
Keywords are not magic — they are the vocabulary the recruiter searches for. This cheatsheet lists the most-searched terms by role: backend, frontend, full-stack, data analyst, data scientist, product manager, devops, QA, and more.
Published 2026-06-21
How recruiter search actually works
When a recruiter has a role to fill, they go into their ATS and type boolean searches: ("React" OR "Next.js") AND ("TypeScript") AND ("Bangalore" OR "Bengaluru"). Every resume that matches gets surfaced; everything else stays buried. If your resume does not use the exact terms in the recruiter's search, you do not exist.
This cheatsheet is the vocabulary list for the most common roles. Use it as a checklist — if a relevant term applies to you and is missing from your resume, add it. If a term does not honestly apply, do not add it.
Backend / API Engineer
Languages: Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, Node.js, TypeScript, C#, Rust.
Frameworks: FastAPI, Django, Flask, Spring Boot, Express, NestJS, Gin, Echo.
Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse.
Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, S3, RDS), GCP, Terraform, Helm.
Concepts: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, event-driven architecture, Kafka, RabbitMQ, OAuth2, JWT.
Frontend Engineer
Core: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Vue, Nuxt, Svelte, SvelteKit.
Styling: Tailwind CSS, CSS Modules, styled-components, Emotion, SCSS.
State / data: Redux Toolkit, Zustand, TanStack Query, SWR, GraphQL, Apollo, Relay.
Tooling: Vite, Webpack, esbuild, Storybook, Playwright, Cypress, Vitest, Jest.
Concepts: server components, hydration, accessibility (WCAG), Core Web Vitals, SSR, ISR.
Full-stack Engineer
Combine the backend and frontend lists. Add at least one full-stack framework: Next.js, Remix, T3 stack, Rails, Laravel, Django + React.
Data Analyst
SQL: PostgreSQL, MySQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, ClickHouse.
Languages: Python (pandas, NumPy), R.
BI tools: Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Metabase, Apache Superset.
Concepts: ETL/ELT, dimensional modelling, cohort analysis, A/B testing, statistical significance, dashboards, KPIs.
Data Scientist / ML Engineer
Core: Python, scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, pandas, NumPy.
LLM stack: LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI API, Anthropic API, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant), RAG, embeddings.
MLOps: MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, SageMaker, Vertex AI.
Concepts: feature engineering, model evaluation, A/B testing, drift detection, supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning.
Product Manager
Frameworks: Jobs-to-be-Done, RICE, ICE, OKRs, North Star metric.
Tools: Jira, Confluence, Linear, Figma, FigJam, Notion, Amplitude, Mixpanel, GA4.
Concepts: product discovery, user research, hypothesis testing, roadmap planning, stakeholder management, GTM strategy, P&L ownership.
DevOps / SRE
Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure.
Containers / Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, Flux.
IaC: Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible.
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, OpenTelemetry.
Concepts: SLO/SLI, incident response, blameless postmortems, chaos engineering, GitOps, blue-green and canary deployments.
QA / Test Engineer
Frameworks: Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, TestNG, JUnit, PyTest, RestAssured.
Concepts: test pyramid, BDD (Cucumber/Gherkin), API testing, performance testing (JMeter, k6), security testing (OWASP Top 10), test data management.
Use this with the builder
Paste the JD into our builder. It compares the JD against your input and tells you which of these keywords are missing — then writes bullets that include them naturally. No keyword stuffing.