QA Engineer Job Description

Key skills

Responsibilities

• • Design comprehensive test plans that cover functional, edge case, and regression scenarios
• • Build and maintain automated end-to-end test suites for critical user flows
• • Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to provide fast, reliable quality gates
• • Conduct exploratory testing sessions to find defects that automated tests miss
• • Write clear, reproducible bug reports with steps to reproduce, expected behavior, and actual behavior
• • Collaborate with developers to define acceptance criteria before work begins
• • Track defect metrics and quality trends to surface systemic issues to engineering leadership
• • Contribute to team processes that reduce defect escape rate and improve overall release confidence

Requirements

• • 3+ years of QA engineering experience with a mix of manual and automated testing
• • Hands-on experience building automated E2E test suites with Playwright, Cypress, or equivalent
• • Demonstrated ability to design test plans from requirements without a template
• • Experience integrating test suites into GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent CI/CD systems
• • Strong analytical thinking and an ability to anticipate failure modes proactively
• • Clear communication skills for filing bug reports and advocating for quality with stakeholders

Nice to have

• • Experience with performance or load testing tools in a production environment
• • Knowledge of accessibility testing tools and WCAG compliance verification
• • Familiarity with mobile test automation (Appium, Detox, or XCUITest)
• • Experience with contract testing using Pact or similar consumer-driven testing frameworks

What to look for in a great QA Engineer

Great QA engineers have a particular mindset: they derive satisfaction from breaking things, not from approving them. Look for candidates who describe test scenarios in terms of user impact, not just technical coverage. Strong QAs ask 'what could go wrong?' before a feature is built, not after. They understand that manual exploratory testing and automated regression suites serve different purposes and invest in both appropriately. An ability to push back on unrealistic timelines that would compromise quality — respectfully but clearly — is a sign of professional maturity in this role.

Interview questions to ask a QA Engineer

Ask the candidate to write a test plan for a simple feature you describe verbally — observe how they handle ambiguity, edge cases, and non-functional requirements like performance and accessibility. Ask them to walk through how they would automate a test for a multi-step checkout flow: probe their selector strategy, flakiness prevention, and data management approach. Ask what they do when they find a severe bug two hours before a planned release. Finally, ask about a time their testing missed a production defect — you are looking for honest reflection and process improvement, not a perfect record.

Where to source QA Engineers

QA-focused communities like the Ministry of Testing and TestProject forums surface practitioners who invest in their craft. LinkedIn filtered by specific automation frameworks (Playwright, Cypress) narrows to engineers with current skills. Developers who have moved into QA roles can bring strong coding skills that elevate the automation quality significantly. Meetups and conferences focused on testing (EuroSTAR, CAST) surface practitioners with depth. For senior hires, look for candidates who blog or speak about testing methodology — it signals someone who thinks systemically about quality, not just someone who runs scripts.