Tech-Industry Verbs
The verbs that signal you have actually shipped — for engineers, PMs, designers, and operators.
When to use this bank
Use these in any tech-industry bio where the reader is another tech-industry person. Marketing-style verbs ('leveraged', 'synergized') trigger immediate dismissal in this audience. The verbs in this bank survive technical-reader scrutiny.
When not to use it
Avoid these verbs when writing for non-technical audiences, where they will read as jargon. Avoid the 'engineering-flavored' verbs ('committed', 'merged') outside their literal context.
The vocabulary
Organized into 6 groups. Each group has its own guidance.
Shipped
13 wordsThe verbs of having actually moved something into production.
Built
14 wordsVerbs of construction and architectural ownership.
Scaled / Operated
17 wordsVerbs that name the operational side of running tech systems.
Owned
8 wordsVerbs of responsibility — clearly signal authority without overclaiming.
Researched / Specified
11 wordsVerbs for the part of the work that happens before code is shipped.
Avoid these in tech bios
12 wordsThese verbs are immediately recognizable as marketing-borrowed and read as filler.
Where these words pair well
Pair one 'Shipped' verb with one 'Scaled / Operated' verb to convey both delivery and stewardship.
Pair one 'Shipped' verb with one 'Owned' verb. The combination signals delivery and accountability without crossing into engineering-claim territory.
Before and after
What this bank looks like applied to a single sentence.
A passionate leader who has championed the digital transformation journey by leveraging cutting-edge technologies to drive meaningful, scalable outcomes across multiple organizations.
She rebuilt the Stripe Connect ingest pipeline in 2023, moving the system from a single-region Postgres deployment to a multi-region sharded Spanner cluster that now handles seventeen-thousand transactions per second at p99 under thirty milliseconds.