Marginalia resume & CV template
A serif page with every section labelled out in the left margin and the leading pulled tight. Scholarly and compact.
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
- Serif typeface
- Single column
- No 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 Marginalia as a CV
Marginalia is a single serif column with no photo, which is the closest thing here to an academic CV: the format that runs to as many pages as your publications, grants and teaching need. It is equally a British CV as it stands, where the document is a two-page career summary rather than a complete record.
It is set tight, which helps on the two-page limit most non-academic CVs are read against.
More on the differences: CV templates and CV examples.
Is Marginalia the right choice?
Who it suits
Academic and research pages with a lot of sections. A serif face with labels in the margin, set tight enough to stay on one sheet.
What it does to ATS parsing
Single column with the section labels in their own column. Safe.
At two pages
Very good — this is a layout that improves at length.
Use something else if
Codex for considerably more space, or Beaufort for the sans equivalent.
Other templates
Build it in the editor
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