QA Engineer

Also known as: Quality Assurance Engineer, Software Tester, Test Engineer, Manual QA Engineer, QA Analyst.

What does a QA Engineer do?

A QA Engineer is an engineer who owns product quality: decides what and how to test, finds bugs before users do and helps decide whether a release is ready. In a strong team QA joins at the requirements stage, not after the code is written:

• review requirements and find contradictions and missing scenarios;
• design test cases and decide which risks to check first;
• test features by hand, including exploratory testing;
• write and maintain some automated tests, usually at API or UI level;
• reproduce and describe bugs so a developer can fix them straight away.

When does a company need a QA Engineer?

A company needs a QA Engineer when bugs regularly reach users and developers spend more and more time on fixes after release. This usually happens when the product has grown to several teams, releases have become more frequent, or payments, personal data and integrations have appeared where a mistake is expensive. A separate case is the first QA in a team, who has to build a quality process from scratch. The role won't work if what the company really needs is test automation infrastructure and a faster CI: then you need an SDET, not another tester.

QA Engineer vs SDET: what's the difference?

A QA Engineer differs from an SDET in starting from the product and the user, while an SDET starts from code and test infrastructure. A QA Engineer designs checks, looks for risks and tests by hand and with automated tests; an SDET writes frameworks and sets up test runs in CI/CD and test environments. A common mistake is to post a QA role and expect developer-level coding. A QA Automation Engineer sits between them and writes automated tests in an existing framework.

QA Engineer vs related roles: comparison

Why is it hard to hire a QA Engineer?

A QA Engineer is hard to hire because a job post attracts many applications, but few strong candidates among them.

• The entry barrier is low, and most applications come from people after short courses with no product experience.
• QA CVs look alike: a list of tools doesn't show whether the person can think about risks and find non-obvious bugs.
• Every company needs its own mix of manual testing and automation, and candidates are often strong in only one part.
• Experienced QA engineers from product companies with frequent releases already have jobs and rarely apply.

What to decide before hiring a QA Engineer?

• Where do bugs currently slip into production? Without the answer it's unclear whether you need someone for test design, regression or automation.
• What mix of manual testing and automation do you need? Expecting one person to do both at a high level will drag the search out.
• What is being tested: web, mobile apps, APIs, data, ML features? Experience in one area transfers poorly to another, especially in mobile and ML.
• Is this the first QA in the team or a hire into an existing team? The first QA needs experience building a process, not just testing.
• Who decides that a release is ready? If QA has no right to stop a release, a strong candidate will see the role as a formality.

Where to find a QA Engineer?

QA Engineers most often come from product companies with frequent releases, fintech, e-commerce and mobile development, where mistakes are costly and a quality process is already in place. A strong signal in a profile is experience with a product as complex as yours: payments, integrations, mobile releases. Another signal is the person describing how they changed the testing process, not only which tools they used. NEWHR finds these candidates by the results of their work, not by applications to job posts.

How to assess a QA Engineer in an interview?

A QA Engineer is assessed with a test-design exercise on a real feature of your product and a walkthrough of a bug the candidate found in a previous job. In the exercise the candidate decides which cases and risks to check and what to automate or not. On the company side a QA Lead or Engineering Manager takes part, and for a role with automation a short practical task is added, reviewed by a developer.

Strong signals:

• starts with questions about users and risks, not a list of testing types;
• finds scenarios in the exercise that its authors didn't think of;
• explains which checks they would deliberately skip and why.

Red flags:

• describes the job only as running ready-made test cases;
• can't give an example of a bug they found on their own rather than from a checklist;
• believes only QA is responsible for quality, not the whole team.

How long does it take to hire a QA Engineer?

We present the first candidates for the QA Engineer role within 5–7 days of the brief.

Related roles

• SDET — a developer who builds test infrastructure rather than testing features.
• Evals Engineer — assesses the quality of AI model outputs where there is no single right answer.
• DevOps Engineer — owns the pipelines and environments that tests run in.
• Product Analyst — looks at the product through data rather than through testing scenarios.