The 2,600-character About section. Three paragraphs: what you do, the proof, what you're looking for. First-person, conversational, specific. The opening line decides whether the profile gets read.
Paragraph one (what you do): the discipline, the level, the domain, the outcome that anchors your work. 'I'm a senior backend engineer with 9 years scaling payment infrastructure at Stripe and Cloudflare. The last 3 years I've focused on Kafka pipelines moving more than $1B annual GMV through real-time fraud scoring.'
Paragraph two (the proof): two or three concrete projects with the technical and business context. Mention the stack, the constraint, and the outcome. Treat it like an expanded bullet from your CV with one extra sentence of why-it-mattered.
Paragraph three (what you want next): the role, the size of company, the kind of problem. 'Looking for a staff-engineer role at a Series B or C fintech where the payments problem is still load-bearing. Most useful early in the stack, less useful refactoring a mature codebase.' Close with a contact preference (DM, email, calendar link).
1,500 to 2,000 characters of the 2,600 available. Long enough to develop the three paragraphs. Short enough that the reader gets to the close without skimming.
First person reads warmer and lets you be specific without sounding like a press release. Third person is appropriate only for founders or executives writing for press, not for hiring.
A specific statement of what you do, who for, and the outcome that anchors it. Skip 'passionate about', 'results-driven', and any reflexive credential listing.
Yes, organically. The same logic as a resume summary: name technologies, methodologies, and domains naturally in the paragraphs. Don't stuff a keyword block at the bottom.
Twice a year minimum, or any time you change roles, ship a major outcome, or shift the kind of work you want. Stale summaries underperform.
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