What does the Software QA/SDET career path look like in your organizations?
I am working on defining a Career Path for my QA team. I have identified 3 different tracks as below:
- Individual Contributor Track: Junior QA -> Intermediate QA -> Senior QA -> Staff QA -> Principal QA
- Managerial Track: Junior QA -> Intermediate QA -> Senior QA -> QA Lead -> QA Manager -> Senior QA Manager -> QA Director
- SDET Track: Junior SDET -> Intermediate SDET -> Senior SDET -> Staff SDET -> Principal SDET
Wondering what does the Software QA/SDET role career path looks like in your organizations?
![Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fmeta.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Da7a5bcc0-e178-4b5b-b71e-09bf6c6aefae&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
![Entry-Level Software Engineer [L3] at Google company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fgoogle.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D780356ef-3efc-4728-9eb4-d909b75bb4a6&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
Discussion
(4 comments)- 02 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
Almost all the Quality Assurance (QA) people I worked with at Meta were on contract, not FTE.
This already tells you something about the (lack of) importance that the company places on QA, that they are comfortable contracting it out instead of keeping it in-house. So there will be a "ceiling" to your career if you are in QA.
There's more opportunity for career growth in the area of SDET. At Meta, these were called Test Automation Engineers, and they wrote testing code or developed test plans for various features.
- 1
2 months agoQuality Assurance/SDET Lead Engineer [OP]Myant HealthThanks Rahul for sharing your observations & experience regarding QA/SDET roles.
In my case, I've seen all these career paths in action in my previous roles:
- Tracks 1 & 2 at Shopify, Canada
- Tracks 2 & 3 at TD Bank, Canada
- Track 3 at Walmart Labs, Canada
Personally, I prefer Track 3 - SDET.
Regarding the QA track, I also noticed that lead roles were typically permanent, while most other team members were on contract.
These days, there’s no traditional QA role focused solely on QA tasks. QA professionals are now expected to know automation, which, in my opinion, negatively impacts the quality of their work. Many QAs learn automation out of necessity - since finding a job without automation skills is difficult - but their lack of genuine interest often results in poor-quality automation code. On the other hand, automation developers tend to focus purely on automation and are reluctant to spend time exploring application behavior.
For this reason, I believe exploratory testing and automation roles should remain separate, which is why I outlined the three tracks above.
- 0
2 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI think for the most part, QA (assuming it's a real organization at your company with depth/levels) will have similar career paths to SWE, following the classic level structure: "What do career levels structure in big tech company look like? What are the responsibilities for each level?"
I think something for you to figure out is what expectations will look like concretely at each level as the words "junior", "intermediate", "senior", etc do a lot of the heavy lifting. SWE is different from QA, but a lot of the behaviors as engineers level up are common. I recommend going through our learning paths for inspiration:
- 12 months agoQuality Assurance/SDET Lead Engineer [OP]Myant Health
Thank you so much, Alex, for sharing the thread on job levels. It gave me valuable insights into how different companies define job levels. I'm following a similar approach and working on defining role expectations.
I'll also check out the promotion series videos you shared. I really appreciate all the resources. Thanks again!
