Remote Resume 2026: 7-Section Template That Beats the ATS

Your resume is the only thing standing between you and a $130K remote role you're qualified for. In 2026, 81% of remote hiring teams still use ATS pre-filters before a human reads anything, and the average recruiter spends 7.2 seconds on the first pass. If your resume is built like a 2018 corporate CV, you're getting filtered out before the rejection auto-email fires.

This is the no-cap WFA resume playbook for 2026 — every section, the exact word counts, what to delete, and the line-by-line template I use to land 3 callbacks per 10 applications on WFA Jobs.

What does a remote-friendly resume look like in 2026?

One page. Plain text. No photo. No "objective". 7 sections in this exact order: header, summary, skills, experience (60% of space), projects, education, extras. PDF or .docx — both render fine in modern ATS. Avoid .pages, .indd, scanned images, and PDF-of-a-screenshot.

Total: ~450–650 words. Anything more, you're padding.

Section 1: Header that survives the ATS

Format: Name → role you want → timezone (not city) → email → GitHub/portfolio. Skip phone unless the role is country-locked.

``` SARA OKONKWO Backend Engineer · UTC+1 (Berlin) · Open to Worldwide sara.okonkwo@gmail.com · github.com/sokonkwo · sarabuilds.dev ```

Why timezone not city: remote recruiters in 2026 filter on UTC overlap, not country. Writing "UTC+1" instantly tells an SF startup you're 9-hour-shifted (skip) and tells a London team you're +1 (good). Writing "Berlin, Germany" forces them to look up the offset and 40% won't bother.

Skip: photo, marital status, date of birth, full address, two-page header bar from Canva. ATS strips most of it and humans get judgy.

Section 2: Summary — 1 sentence, metric included

Formula: `[Seniority] [role] who [verb + metric/impact], looking for [type of role].`

Bad (corporate ladder energy): > Highly motivated, results-driven engineer with proven track record of delivering quality solutions in fast-paced environments.

Good (2026 WFA energy): > Senior backend engineer who took Datadog's billing pipeline from 8h → 12min cron, looking for a staff IC role at a remote-first infra startup.

Cuts in half, says exactly what you do and what you want. The recruiter knows in 4 seconds if you're a fit.

Section 3: Skills, ranked by recency

Two columns max. Group by what you've actually shipped in the last 18 months. Stop listing the SQL dialect you touched in 2017.

``` Languages Go, TypeScript, Python (Rust shipping prod since Q1 2026) Infra Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS (EKS, RDS, Lambda), Cloudflare Data PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka Tools Linear, Loom, Tailscale, GitHub Actions ```

What to delete: "Microsoft Office", "Excellent communication", "Team player", "Agile methodologies", "Problem-solving skills". The ATS doesn't score these. Humans roll their eyes at them.

What to add: 1–2 tools the JD mentions. If the JD says "we use Cal.com and Linear", and you do too — say so. Keyword match isn't gaming, it's hygiene.

Section 4: Experience — 60% of the resume, metric-first bullets

Each bullet is one line. Format: `[Verb] [thing] [metric] [outcome].`

Bad: > Worked on improving the performance of our backend services.

Good: > Cut p99 checkout latency from 1.4s → 280ms by replacing Redis pub/sub with NATS, increasing conversion by 3.1% ($2.4M/yr).

For remote roles specifically, 1 bullet per job should describe an async/written outcome:

> Authored the team's RFC template; now used by all 32 engineers for design decisions across 4 timezones. Reduced meeting hours per IC from 8h/wk → 2.5h/wk in Q3 2025.

Why: hiring managers for remote-first companies look for evidence you can ship without sync meetings. Make it obvious.

3–4 roles, 3 bullets each. Anything older than 8 years: 1 line, no bullets, just "Backend Engineer @ Big Bank — 2014–2017 (Java, JPMC trading systems)".

Section 5: Projects — proof you ship outside a paycheck

This is where remote roles get decided. For mid+ IC roles in 2026, ~70% of remote hires showed 1+ shippable side project on their resume vs ~30% of US in-office hires. The signal: you can self-direct without a manager.

Format: Name → link → stack → outcome metric.

``` PROJECTS

honkscript.dev — github.com/sokonkwo/honkscript TypeScript transpiler for Go. 1.2K stars, used by 18 production repos.

ratelimiter-rs — github.com/sokonkwo/ratelimiter-rs Sliding-window rate limiter in Rust. 800 req/s on a single core. Crate downloaded 24K times. ```

2 projects beats 8. Quality > quantity. If you don't ship side projects, list a meaningful OSS contribution instead: PR link + what merged.

Section 6: Education — one line, no GPA past 2 years out

``` EDUCATION BSc Computer Science, University of Lagos (2018) ```

If you're more than 2 years out of school: no GPA, no coursework, no clubs. If you're <1 year out: add 1 coursework line + 1 club only if directly relevant.

If you skipped school: replace with Certifications — and only ones the industry actually respects (AWS Solutions Architect, CKA, OSCP). Skip Coursera completion certificates. Recruiters don't count them.

Section 7: Extras — only what actually moves the needle

• Languages: if you speak >1 at professional level, list them with ratings (EN native, FR C1, DE B2). Hugely relevant for EU/LATAM remote roles.
• Talks / writing: 1 link if you have 1 thing. Don't fake it.
• Open source maintainer: if you maintain something with >500 stars, this is a line.
• Hardware: for nomad-tagged jobs ("must travel"), one line is OK: "Setup: M3 Pro 16", LTE failover, Starlink Roam." Recruiters at Bali / nomad-adjacent companies read this.

Delete: hobbies (unless world-class), volunteer work from 2014, "born in", religion, "references on request".

ATS rules you cannot break in 2026

1. No tables for layout. Tables can render in 2026 ATS but text-extraction is still flaky for ~22% of parsers. Use single-column. 2. No icons or emoji in section headers. ATS strips them; humans don't care. 3. No headers/footers in Word. Half of ATS doesn't read them. 4. Save as `Firstname-Lastname-Resume-2026.pdf`. Recruiters search inboxes for this exact pattern. 5. Font: Inter, Source Sans, Helvetica, or Arial — 10.5–11pt body, 13–14pt name. No Calibri (signals dated), no Comic Sans (signals untreated). 6. Color: 1 accent color max. Black + 1 accent. Photos and rainbow palettes break parsing on at least 3 major ATS (Greenhouse, Lever still struggle with embedded PNG).

Three lines that auto-reject you

If your resume contains any of these in 2026, you're filtered out before a human reads anything:

• "Looking for an opportunity to leverage my skills" — every recruiter trigger-words this and skips.
• A 3-line objective. Remove it. The summary covers this in 1 sentence.
• "References available upon request." Of course they are. Delete.

How to test your resume before sending

1. Paste into TextEdit / plain text. If it loses structure, the ATS will too. Fix layout. 2. Run through resumeworded.com or jobscan.co with the job description pasted. Aim for 70%+ keyword match. 3. Show one engineer friend. Ask them to summarize what you do in one sentence. If their answer doesn't match your summary, your summary is broken. 4. Time yourself. Read your own resume from top to bottom in 7 seconds. What did you read? That's what the recruiter sees.

What to do this week

1. Cut your current resume to 1 page. Hard cap. 2. Rewrite every "responsible for…" bullet into `verb + metric + outcome`. 3. Replace your headline city with timezone-first format. 4. Pull 3 remote job postings off WFA Jobs and run keyword-match against each. Edit your skills/projects to mirror the top 5 missing keywords per role. 5. If you want the rest of the loop: pair this resume with the salary negotiation playbook and the 30-day landing plan.

Boring resumes get sorted. Tight, metric-first, remote-aware resumes get callbacks. Pick a side.