A Korean backend developer is applying to US remote roles; we need someone who has hired in the US to review this resume

Goal and context

The candidate is a backend developer with about six years of experience in Korea, applying for the first time to fully remote roles at US companies (mid-size SaaS, Series B to public). The resume below has been anonymised: names, companies, and product names are replaced, but the structure, wording, and numbers are as the candidate wrote them. It was written in English by the candidate, who is fluent but has never worked in an English-speaking company. What the candidate has heard and does not know whether to believe: that US resumes should be one page; that "responsible for" is a red flag; that Korean company names mean nothing to US screeners and should be explained; that listing a university GPA is odd after five years; that the objective line at the top is dated; and that every bullet should have a number in it. Some of that may be folklore. What we want is the reaction of someone who has actually screened resumes for a US engineering team: what would make you stop reading, what would make you schedule a call, and what is merely different from the US norm without being a problem. The resume, anonymised: --- **J. Kim** · Seoul, KST (UTC+9) · open to US remote, overlap 4h+ with PT Objective: Seeking a backend engineer position where I can contribute to scalable systems. **Experience** **Senior Backend Engineer, Company A (Korean e-commerce, ~300 employees)** · 2023–present - Responsible for order and payment services (Kotlin, Spring, PostgreSQL, Kafka). - Migrated the order service from a monolith to 4 services; p95 checkout latency 1.9s → 420ms. - On-call rotation lead; reduced pages per week from ~25 to ~6 by fixing top 5 alert causes. - Mentored 3 junior engineers. **Backend Engineer, Company B (fintech startup, ~40 employees)** · 2020–2023 - Built the ledger service used for all customer balances (Java, MySQL). - Responsible for PCI-DSS audit preparation on the backend side; passed first audit. - Wrote internal library for idempotent API handlers, adopted by 6 teams. **Backend Engineer, Company C (agency)** · 2019–2020 - Developed REST APIs for 5 client projects (Node.js, MongoDB). **Education** B.S. Computer Science, University D, Seoul · 2019 · GPA 3.7/4.5 **Skills** Kotlin, Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kafka, Redis, AWS (ECS, RDS, SQS), Docker, Terraform (basic), Node.js Languages: Korean (native), English (business, TOEIC 935) --- Please treat the content as real and the person as someone who will read your answer.

Result you want

A Markdown review with these sections. 1. **First 20 seconds.** What a US screener notices first, positive and negative, in the order they would notice it. 2. **Stop-reading risks.** Anything that would get this resume set aside, with why. Be specific about which line. 3. **What is fine as-is.** Things the candidate might worry about that a US reader does not care about. Address the six pieces of folklore listed above directly: true, false, or "depends", with one line each. 4. **Line edits.** At most eight rewritten bullets or lines, each shown as before → after, with a one-line reason. Keep the facts; do not invent achievements. 5. **Structural advice.** Order, length, whether the objective stays, whether to explain Korean company context, whether the language line helps or hurts. One paragraph. 6. **What you could not judge.** Anything that depends on the specific role or company. Do not write a full new resume. Do not comment on the anonymisation.

Details

Response

One answer

Credits

500

The Request is public. Only the Member who asked and the Member who answers see the Result.