Placard resume & CV template
Full-width heading labels reversed out of dark blocks with a small square photo top right. Blunt and quick to read.
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
Senior Backend Engineer, Vantage Pay
Jun 2022 – Present
London, UK
- 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
Backend Engineer, Meridian Health
Sep 2019 – May 2022
Manchester, UK
- 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
BSc, Computer Science, University of Manchester
Sep 2016 – Jun 2019
Manchester, UK
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
Certified Kubernetes Administrator, CNCF
Feb 2023 – Feb 2023
AWS Solutions Architect — Associate, AWS
Nov 2021 – Nov 2021
What defines this layout
- Sans-serif typeface
- Single column
- Includes an avatar or photo
- Headings over a full-width rule
- Dates right-aligned against each role
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 Placard as a CV
Placard 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 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 Placard the right choice?
Who it suits
Fast-read applications — agency work, high-volume hiring. Full-width heading blocks are the loudest section markers here.
What it does to ATS parsing
Single column with reversed heading labels. The labels are fills behind real text.
At two pages
Very good. The blocks carry a second page better than almost anything else.
Use something else if
Charcoal for rated skills with it, or Madrid for a coloured version.
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