Key Takeaways

  • 75% of U.S. employers use automated applicant tracking systems to screen resumes before a human reviews them (Harvard Business School & Accenture, 2021)
  • The most common ATS failures are missing keywords, incompatible formatting, and incorrect file types
  • ResumeGeni scores your resume across 8 parsing layers — modeled on the same steps enterprise ATS platforms like Workday, Greenhouse, and Taleo use to evaluate candidates

How ATS Resume Scoring Works

Applicant tracking systems parse your resume into structured data — extracting your name, contact info, work history, skills, and education — then score how well that data matches the job requirements. Many ATS rejections happen because the parser couldn't extract critical fields, not because the candidate wasn't qualified.

LayerWhat It ChecksWhy It Matters
Document extractionFile format, encoding, readabilityCorrupted or image-only PDFs fail immediately
Layout analysisTables, columns, headers, footersMulti-column layouts break field extraction
Section detectionExperience, education, skills headingsNon-standard headings cause sections to be missed
Field mappingName, email, phone, dates, titlesMissing contact info is a common cause of immediate rejection
Keyword matchingJob-specific terms, skills, certificationsKeyword overlap affects recruiter search visibility and ATS scoring
Chronology checkDate ordering, gap detectionReverse-chronological order is expected by most ATS
QuantificationMetrics, numbers, measurable outcomesQuantified achievements help human reviewers and some scoring models
Confidence scoringOverall parse quality and completenessLow-confidence parses get deprioritized in results

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ResumeGeni free?
Yes. ResumeGeni is currently in beta — ATS analysis, scoring, and initial improvement suggestions are free with no signup required. Full guidance and saved reports may require a free account.
What file formats are supported?
PDF, DOCX, DOC, TXT, RTF, ODT, and Apple Pages. PDF and DOCX are recommended for best ATS compatibility.
How is the ATS score calculated?
Your resume is processed through an 8-layer parsing pipeline that extracts structured data the same way enterprise ATS platforms do. The score reflects how completely and accurately your resume can be parsed, plus how well your content matches common ATS ranking criteria.
Can ATS read PDF resumes?
Yes, but not all PDFs are equal. Text-based PDFs parse well. Image-only PDFs (scanned documents) and PDFs with complex tables or multi-column layouts often fail ATS parsing. Our analyzer will flag these issues.
How do I improve my ATS score?
Focus on three areas: use a clean single-column format, include keywords from the job description naturally in your experience bullets, and ensure all sections (contact, experience, education, skills) use standard headings.

ATS Guides & Resources

Built by engineers with 12 years of experience building enterprise hiring technology at ZipRecruiter. Last updated .

Senior Software Engineer

Bastion · New York City

About Bastion

Bastion enables financial institutions and enterprises to issue regulated stablecoins, generate revenue on reserves, and expand their ecosystems. Bastion’s platform combines stablecoin issuance, secure custody, and seamless orchestration for cross-border transfers, on/off-ramps, and stablecoin conversions. With Bastion’s platform and APIs, businesses can create and scale their stablecoin network, while optimizing revenue, compliance, and control.

You can check out our Guide for Candidates here to learn more about our work.

Overview

We are looking for a Backend Engineer to join our engineering team and build the core infrastructure that powers our stablecoin platform. In this role, you'll design and ship services that handle custody, transfers, issuance, and compliance workflows—systems that process real money and require exceptional reliability and security.

You'll work within one of our product verticals (Custody, On/Off Ramps, Issuance, or Shared Services), collaborating closely with product managers, compliance, and other engineers. Our teams are small and cross-functional, which means your work ships fast and has direct impact on customers and partners.

This is an opportunity to build financial infrastructure at a 30+ person company where ownership is real. We're remote-first, async-by-default, and expect engineers to take initiative—whether that's shipping features, improving observability, or strengthening the codebase. If you want to work on hard problems in a regulated domain where your contributions matter immediately, we'd love to talk.

Work to Be Done

Instead of a list of requirements, we want to give you a directional look into the first 30, 90, and 180 days on the job.

We are a startup, so the pace is fast and the specific work will change. You need to be okay with that.

If you think this is something you can handle, we will be excited to speak with you.

This role is based out of our New York City office. We work in a hybrid-but-flexible way (no set days in the office, come in when you think its effective.

First 30 days: Learn the rails, ship confidently

  • Ramp on service architecture, CI/CD, observability, and engineering conventions

  • Ship a small feature slice or quality-of-life improvement in one service

  • Add tests, dashboards, or runbook notes for the areas you touch

  • Build relationships with your vertical team and cross-functional partners

  • Outcomes

    • Multiple safe production deploys with follow-up verification

    • You can run core services locally and trace requests through logs/metrics

    • Updated documentation and/or PRs that improve onboarding in your area

By 90 days: Own a service surface and raise the bar

  • Take ownership of a service or capability across our product, with an eye toward production-readiness

  • Lead a medium-scope project: updating an API contract, implementing a partner integration, or improving robustness of a critical path

  • Strengthen reliability with better logging, tracing, alerts, and failure handling

  • Outcomes

    • A delivered feature or refactor that improves a product metric, SLO, or developer ergonomics

    • You're a go-to person for your service domain

By 180 days: Drive cross-service impact

  • Lead a cross-service initiative, such as an API versioning plan, a data model migration, or a compliance-driven workflow change

  • Shape technical direction with design docs and mentoring

  • Partner with product and compliance to make pragmatic, regulation-aware tradeoffs

  • Outcomes

    • A multi-sprint delivery that simplifies the system and unlocks product velocity

    • Clear before/after reliability or performance improvements

    • Documentation and designs that help others ship faster and safer

Some challenges you might tackle

  • Designing stable, evolvable APIs for custody, transfers, or issuance without breaking downstream clients

  • Building idempotent job flows for high-throughput transfers with strong audit trails

  • Hardening key operations using hardware-backed isolation and robust key policies

  • Improving p95 latency through query tuning, caching, or backpressure strategies

  • Navigating tradeoffs between product velocity and compliance requirements in a regulated environment

  • Building services that integrate with banking partners and crypto infrastructure providers

Your team's typical stack

  • Languages: Go and TypeScript/Node.js; some services in Rust as needed

  • Service patterns: gRPC and REST; GraphQL/tRPC at the edge for frontend BFFs

  • Data and async processing: Postgres, Redis, Kafka

  • Workflow Management: Temporal

  • Infra: AWS, containers, Kubernetes, Terraform; hardware-backed key isolation with Nitro Enclaves for sensitive operations

  • Observability and ops: Datadog, Grafana, Sentry, Incident.io

Bastion provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, and placement. Bastion participates in E-Verify to authorize eligibility of employment in the United States.