This guide is for people 10+ years into their career, in or applying for senior IC, manager, director, or equivalent leadership roles. If you're 5–10 years in, read Mid-career CV. If you're switching field, function, or industry, read Career-changer CV.
TL;DR
By 10+ years in, your CV stops being a record of what you did and becomes a demonstration of how you operate at scale. Job titles do more of the work. Bullets show ownership, scope, and judgement. Make the next role read as the obvious next step.
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1. Your CV is a sales document, not a complete history
By 10+ years in, you have substantial material across multiple roles, and probably across multiple specialisms within them. The risk isn't running out of content. It's a CV that reads as a comprehensive record rather than a focused argument for the next role.
Framework
The Sales Document Test
Does this line sell you for this specific role? If not, cut it.
Format basics carry over from earlier-career CVs: plain text, single column, no graphics, sensible font, two pages. The harder choices at this stage are about emphasis, not formatting.
2. The personal statement at this stage
Three or four lines. The senior personal statement is positioning, not just achievement. Say what kind of leader (or senior IC) you are, what scale you operate at, and what you're looking for next.
Good:
Director of Engineering with 13 years' experience scaling B2B SaaS engineering organisations from 8 to 25+ people. Led platform migration at Acme reducing infrastructure spend $400K annually; rebuilt hiring at BetaCo growing engineering 3x in 18 months. Looking for a VP Engineering or CTO role at a Series B/C company.
Lead with role and tenure. Two or three credentials that show the shape of how you operate, not just one big number. Close with the role you're aiming at, specific.
The shift from earlier guides: at 10+ years in, the recruiter is reading for pattern. Your personal statement should make that pattern visible in the first thirty seconds.
3. Writing experience bullets
Framework
Impact-First bullets
Lead with the quantified outcome, then explain the action.
By now your bullets should shift from delivery to leadership. Less "I did X and the outcome was Y." More "I owned X at this scale and the outcome was Y."
Bad:
Worked on the platform migration project and helped move services to AWS.
Good:
Led platform migration of 40+ services from on-premise to AWS across a 25-person engineering org; reduced infrastructure spend $400K annually and cut deployment time from 2 hours to 12 minutes.
Senior bullets carry three things at once: scope (40+ services, 25 people), ownership ("led"), and outcome ($400K saved, deployment time cut). All three matter. A bullet with the outcome but no scope reads as if you delivered it solo. A bullet with scope but no outcome reads as if you supervised but didn't deliver.
Borrow company-level context where it adds scale: "Series C SaaS scaling 200% YoY on $50M Series C funding." By the senior tier, the company context line under each role does meaningful work.
Two rules unchanged from earlier guides:
- Don't force the formula on context lines describing the company or role. That's setup.
- Don't invent numbers. The temptation grows with seniority. Resist it. We'll come back to this in section 9.
4. Prioritise harder
By 10+ years in, you have far more than fits on two pages. Choose ruthlessly.
A working hierarchy:
- Current or most recent role: five to six bullets. Full treatment.
- Previous role: four bullets, top achievements.
- Two roles ago: two to three bullets, sharpest moments.
- Roles 12+ years ago: one bullet or a single summary line. Often off the document entirely.
- First job out of university: almost always off.
The cuts to make first:
- Bullets that are activity, not achievement.
- Numbers that aren't load-bearing for the next role.
- Roles in industries you're no longer in unless context makes them recognisable.
- Earlier titles that don't help the trajectory.
- Certifications that are no longer current.
If a bullet doesn't help the reader understand why you're right for the role, it's noise. Cut it.
5. Show the next step
Senior CVs are read for shape and trajectory more than any other tier. The recruiter is asking one question first: does this next role read as the obvious next step for this person?
Framework
The Next-Step Test
Read your CV as if you were the recruiter. Does the role you're applying for read as the obvious next step? If not, reorder, reweight, or rewrite until it does.
Senior careers are rarely a straight line. A move from Director of Engineering at a Series B SaaS to VP Engineering at a Series C is obvious. A move from Director of Engineering to CTO at a smaller company is obvious if framed as scope expansion, less obvious if framed as a downgrade in title.
Make the trajectory visible:
- Order and weight signal pattern. Most-recent roles get most space. Older roles compress. The reader's eye traces a clear arc down the page.
- Job titles do narrative work. A title block that reads Director of Engineering → Senior Engineering Manager → Engineering Manager shows clear progression. Match that with bullets that show expanding scope at each step.
- Lateral moves need framing. If your career has been a series of intentional sideways moves into different industries or stages, lead with that in your personal statement: "deliberately rotated across consumer, B2B, and developer-tools companies to build cross-context fluency." Don't apologise for shape that doesn't fit a straight line. Explain it.
The personal statement starts the story. The order and weighting of your experience section lands it.
6. Promotions and progression
By the senior tier, three or four titles inside one employer is common. Format scales:
Acme
Director of Engineering — Mar 2023 to Present
Senior Engineering Manager — Jan 2021 to Mar 2023
Engineering Manager — Aug 2019 to Jan 2021
Three titles, one block. Bullets sit under the most recent role unless an earlier title had genuinely distinct achievements at meaningfully different scope.
One judgement call senior CVs get wrong: consolidating versus expanding. Expanding shows progression cleanly when each title represents a real step in scope. Consolidating to just the most senior title hides progression and can read as if you were always at that level. Default to showing progression. Consolidate only when the earlier title is genuinely minor or short-lived.
7. Education
One line. University, degree, year. Optional second line for a recent and senior credential (an executive education programme at a recognised institution, an MBA, or a clearly senior certification).
By this stage, A-levels, GCSEs, dissertations, modules, grades, and any school-level material is off the document. Your career is the headline.
8. Make it legible
Framework
The Join-the-Dots Rule
Use plain English. Make the relevance obvious.
By 10+ years in, you've accumulated industry shorthand and forgotten what the outside world calls things. Strip it. Senior CVs get read by board members, recruiters at companies in adjacent industries, and search consultants who have to translate your story for clients. Make it easy.
Spell out acronyms the first time. Replace insider terms with plain English. Add brief context to employer names that aren't self-explanatory.
9. Tailoring, things to leave off, don't lie
Tailoring. Keep one master CV, then make role-specific edits before each application. For genuinely different categories of role (different industry, different function, different stage), two or three master versions.
Things to leave off:
- Age, date of birth
- Gender, sexuality, marital status
- Ethnicity, religion
- Full street address
- Photo
- "References available on request"
- A-levels, GCSEs, school-level material
- Hobbies that don't earn their place
- Languages that aren't relevant
- Certifications that are no longer current
- Short tenures early in career
Don't lie. Rounding is fine. Senior temptations are different from earlier-career ones: inflating team size, claiming P&L ownership when you advised on the budget, taking credit for org-level outcomes you contributed to but didn't drive, claiming "led" for projects where you sponsored or oversaw. The principle's unchanged. Sell yourself; don't mis-sell.
More to come. If you're 5–10 years in, read Mid-career CV. If you're switching field, function, or industry, read Career-changer CV.