Cygnus resume & CV template
A deep navy band carrying a round photo, with the dates stepped down their own column beneath it.
Summary
Backend engineer, six years on payments and identity. I like the systems that have to be correct at 3am, and I write the runbook before the incident rather than after it.
Experience
Jun 2022 – Present
London, UK
Senior Backend Engineer, Vantage Pay
- Split the checkout monolith into three services, cutting deploys from 40 minutes to under 6
- Brought settlement failures from 2% to under 0.1% by rebuilding the reconciliation job
- Own the on-call rotation for a service handling 40,000 transactions a day
Sep 2019 – May 2022
Manchester, UK
Backend Engineer, Meridian Health
- Built the FHIR integration connecting 14 NHS trusts to a shared records API
- Cut p99 latency on the patient lookup endpoint from 1.9s to 240ms
- Introduced contract testing, ending a class of breakage that had caused 6 outages
Education
Sep 2016 – Jun 2019
Manchester, UK
BSc, Computer Science, University of Manchester
Skills
- Go (Expert)
- PostgreSQL (Expert)
- Kubernetes (Advanced)
- Python (Advanced)
- Distributed systems (Expert)
- Terraform (Advanced)
- gRPC (Advanced)
- Observability (Expert)
Languages
- English (Native)
- Igbo (Native)
- French (Conversational)
Certificates
Feb 2023 – Feb 2023
Certified Kubernetes Administrator, CNCF
Nov 2021 – Nov 2021
AWS Solutions Architect — Associate, AWS
What defines this layout
- Sans-serif typeface
- Single column
- Includes an avatar or photo
- Headings with no rule
- Dates in their own left column
Every one of these is a setting, not a constraint — accent colour, font, size, spacing and page margins stay yours under Customize, and switching template later re-renders what you’ve written rather than starting it over.
Using Cygnus as a CV
Cygnus carries a photo, which is what a continental European CV expects alongside the personal details a British one leaves out. For the UK, Ireland or Australia, turn the photo off in Customize — the layout closes up around it and the rest of the page is unchanged.
It sits at a normal density, which lands most histories on the two pages a non-academic CV is expected to fit.
More on the differences: CV templates and CV examples.
Is Cygnus the right choice?
Who it suits
Anyone who wants a photo and a strong header without a sidebar. The dated left column makes a varied history easy to follow.
What it does to ATS parsing
Single column, which is the good news. The dates sit in their own column but remain ordinary text.
At two pages
Strong. The date column is what keeps a long history legible past the first page.
Use something else if
Skipper for the same idea in a lighter navy, or Anthracite without the round photo.
Other templates
Build it in the editor
Live preview, AI writing help, and an ATS-ready PDF. Free to start, and no card at any point.
Start your resume