Jake's Resume (created by Jake Gutierrez) won r/EngineeringResumes and university career fairs for a simple reason: density without clutter. The tight line spacing, compact section headers, and bullet-first structure fit roughly 40% more content on one page than a typical Word template — which matters when you need two internships, four projects, and a leadership section to all survive the one-page rule.

It also signals the right things to tech recruiters. The LaTeX typography reads as an engineering-culture artifact, and the strict reverse-chronological, no-graphics structure means a screener finds role, company, and dates in the same place on every resume that uses it.

Jake's is one of the safest layouts you can feed an applicant tracking system. Single column, so parsing order matches reading order. Plain-text contact line — no header/footer blocks, which several parsers skip. Standard section names (Experience, Projects, Education, Skills) that match the field names Workday, Greenhouse and Lever expect. Dates in a consistent right-aligned column that parsers reliably associate with the correct role.

The one parsing caveat in the original LaTeX version: some PDF generators emit ligatures (fi, fl) as single glyphs that older parsers garble. Our rendered downloads avoid ligature substitution entirely, and the Word version sidesteps the issue by construction.

It is unforgiving past roughly six years of experience — the density that flatters a student's two internships makes a senior engineer's history read like a wall. Career changers also struggle: the education-prominent ordering and projects emphasis assume your degree and side projects are your strongest evidence.

And because half the applicants at any college career fair use it, it does nothing to differentiate you visually. That's a fair trade — the content differentiates, the format just has to not fail — but if you want a template that breathes more, use Minimal; if you're past mid-career, use Classic.

The three templates engineering students actually compare: Jake's is the densest and most ATS-conservative of the trio. The Harvard template (bullet-point format from Harvard's career office) is roomier and reads better for non-tech roles, but fits visibly less content. Deedy (the two-column LaTeX template) looks striking and fits a lot — but its two-column layout is precisely what ATS parsing guides warn against: column-hopping parsers can interleave your skills into your work history.

If you're applying to software roles through online portals, Jake's or Harvard are the safe picks; save Deedy for PDFs you hand directly to a human.