A resume for AI roles as a fresher: what to put above the fold

How to structure a one-page resume for GenAI and AI engineering roles when you have no full-time experience: projects with numbers first, a skills line that matches job posts, and what to cut.

Presenting to a room
Presenting to a room

A fresher's resume for an AI role has one job: make the reviewer open a project link in the first fifteen seconds. Most resumes I see in placement clinics bury the projects under a college header and a paragraph of adjectives. Here is the order that works, from what I have seen get callbacks.

Above the fold

  1. Name, one-line positioning, links. "GenAI engineer · RAG, fine-tuning, production AI apps" and clickable GitHub, LinkedIn and portfolio links. No address, no photo.
  2. Three projects, each in three lines: what problem, what you built (with the stack), one number — users, evaluation score, latency, VRAM. A link on each title.
  3. Skills, one dense line grouped by area, matching the vocabulary of the job posts you are applying to.

Below the fold

  • Wins and talks — hackathon prizes with the institute and year, sessions you delivered. These are evidence of initiative; they belong on the page.
  • Education, one line. Degree, institution, year. Grades only if strong.
  • Community and open source, if real.

Writing the project lines

Bad: "Developed an AI-powered chatbot using the latest technologies." Good: "Built a RAG assistant over 400 pages of department notes; hybrid retrieval + reranking + confidence gate; recall@5 0.91 on a 60-question set; 40 weekly users." The second is longer and takes less time to evaluate.

Cut

  • The objective paragraph.
  • Soft-skill lists.
  • Courses and certificates unless the role requires one.
  • Anything you cannot talk about for five minutes.

Match, then send

Read three job posts for the role, note the words they repeat — retrieval, evaluation, LLM APIs, FastAPI — and make sure the resume uses them where true. Then send it with the portfolio it points to, because the resume is only the doorway; the projects in five AI portfolio projects that get interviews are the room.

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Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour
GenAI Engineer · Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).

Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.

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Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges.

Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer in Kanpur