The School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, was founded in 2001. It is one of the first batch of National Demonstrative Software Colleges in China, consisting of three departments: the Department of Software Technology, the Department of Software Service Engineering, and the Department of Data Science and Engineering. The school holds the right to confer doctoral, master's and bachelor's degrees in Software Engineering, and houses a postdoctoral research station in Software Engineering.

In 2009, the school was approved by the Ministry of Education to establish the "National Experimental Zone for Innovative Software Talent Training Modes". In 2010, its Software Engineering program was selected as one of the first pilot programs under the Ministry of Education's "Excellent Engineer Education and Training Program". It joined the first batch of "National Engineering Practice Education Centers" in 2011, and its Software Engineering program was included in the first batch of "Pilot Programs for Comprehensive Professional Reform" by the Ministry of Education in 2012. The school won the first prize of the 7th Guangdong Provincial Teaching Achievement Award in 2014, and its Software Engineering program was approved as a pilot program for comprehensive reform of undergraduate majors in Guangdong Province in 2015. It received a B+ rating in the 4th Round of National Discipline Evaluation in 2017, was recognized as a National First-Class Undergraduate Major Construction Site in 2019, and its Software Engineering program passed the Engineering Education Professional Certification in 2021.

The school boasts a teaching and research team with rich experience and high academic standards. Currently, it has 71 faculty members, including 39 full-time teachers, 14 professors, 10 associate professors, and 1 associate researcher. It has established 7 research teams: Intelligent Software and Robotics, Software Service Engineering and Cloud Computing, Software Construction Theory and Methods, Big Data Systems and Cloud Computing, Data Science and Intelligent Software, Large-Scale Software Development Methods and Applications, and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The school also houses 1 key laboratory of the Ministry of Education, 6 provincial and ministerial-level scientific research bases, and 2 talent training bases. The scientific research bases include the Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robotics of the Ministry of Education, the Key Laboratory of Cross-Media Big Data and Machine Intelligence of Guangdong Provincial Universities, the Guangdong Provincial Engineering Technology Research Center for Social Media Processing and Software Development, the Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Robot Software and Complex Information Processing, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Laboratory of Big Data and Robot Intelligence, the Guangdong Provincial Engineering Technology Research Center for Software Development and Services, and the Guangdong Provincial Engineering Technology Research Center for Multimedia Intelligent Marketing. The talent training bases are the National Experimental Zone for Innovative Software Talent Training Modes and the National Engineering Practice Education Center. The school has successively undertaken various scientific research projects, such as National Natural Science Foundation projects, key applied projects of Guangdong Province, major science and technology innovation projects of Guangdong Province, major industry-university-research collaborative innovation projects of Guangzhou, and cooperative projects with enterprises. It has produced a number of high-level scientific research achievements and published a large number of high-quality academic papers.

The school currently has nearly 2,000 students, including undergraduates and postgraduates. Adhering to the Party's educational policy, the school integrates the cultivation and practice of core socialist values into the entire process of education and teaching, aiming to cultivate socialist builders and successors with all-round development of morality, intelligence, physical fitness, aesthetics and labor. In line with the guiding spirit of running National Demonstrative Software Colleges, the school adheres to the educational philosophy of "operating with new mechanisms and cultivating with new models; strengthening engineering training, enhancing university-enterprise cooperation, and integrating with international standards; cultivating compound software R&D talents with solid foundations, strong capabilities, excellent English proficiency and good teamwork skills". Facing the needs of national and regional technological and industrial development, the school is committed to cultivating high-quality, engineering-oriented, internationalized and compound software engineering elites and leaders in the software industry, who possess solid theoretical and technical foundations in software engineering, as well as innovative thinking, creative ability and entrepreneurial spirit. The employment rate of the school's graduates has remained above 99% every year, with most of them employed by well-known international and domestic IT enterprises.