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Hereās How to Write a Cover Letter in 2026
I get asked about cover letters all the time in the AI/ML Career Launchpad:
Are they worth the time to write? Do they even get read? Should you use AI? How can you write a good one that actually helps your job search?
The good news is I think thereās a pretty easy way to write cover letters quickly that also catch recruitersā eyes.
Some key things to keep in mind:
Keep it short, maximum half a page.
Do not use AI. Seriously, they can tell. While some recruiters are ok with it, about 20% will reject a candidate outright when they notice something was written by AI.
Show four things:
The fit between the role and your experience
Strong communication ability (again, no AI)
Any connection you have to the role/company
And that you actually read the job description. I think a super easy way to do this is to find a detail from the companyās technical blog, YouTube, conference presentations, etc. and mention that in the cover letter.
Hereās a template:
Dear Hiring Manager,
Iām applying for the position of <position>.
From reading the job description, this position looks both fun and challenging. I have several years of experience <with something as related as possible, using keywords from the job description, ideally ending with your impact>.
I am particularly interested in this position because of <some detail from the technical blog, referral, fit between your background and the job description>.
I hope to discuss the position further with you soon.
Best wishes,
Your Name
Thatās it! No need to rehash everything in your resume. Keep it short and sweet and kit the key points quickly. Hereās an example:
Dear Hiring Manager,
I'm applying for the Machine Learning Engineer position on the Recommendations team.
From reading the job description, this position looks both fun and challenging. I have four years of experience building and deploying recommendation systems in production, most recently owning a content-ranking model that lifted click-through rate by 12% for a platform serving 30M monthly users.
I am particularly interested in this position because of your engineering blog post on moving from batch to real-time feature serving. The tradeoffs you described around freshness versus infra cost mirror a migration I led last year, and I'd love to work on that problem at your scale.
I hope to discuss the position further with you soon.
Best wishes,
Marina
Hope this helps!
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