QA Engineer / QA Analyst
Finds what the people who built it cannot see — and builds the harness that keeps finding it after they have moved on.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
The first non-coding technical hire worth making, and the one skipped most often. Two different jobs share the title: manual QA, which is exploratory and judgement-led, and automation, which is software engineering pointed at the test suite. Decide which you are hiring; the strongest people do both but lead with one.
Education
No requirement. A tester who can write a reproducible bug report is worth three who report that it is broken.
Experience
2+ years for manual, 4+ for automation. Ask them to find a bug in your product during the interview — the good ones will have found one before they arrive.
Vertical / domain experience
Matters where the failure is regulated or physical: medical devices, payments, safety systems. Elsewhere, curiosity and method transfer.
What it pays, roughly
$90,002 median, Canada — for Computer, software and Web designers and developers, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $69,992 to $117,499 over 276,895 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| ISTQB — software testing certification | International Software Testing Qualifications Board | The recognised testing credential, and common outside North America in particular. | Study |
| Automation framework experience | — | No certificate matters as much as a suite they wrote that a team still runs. | — |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
The founder clicks through it before every release, and writes down what broke.
Not yet a hire. A checklist per release and automated tests on the paths that take money.
A real QA function once a regression costs more than a week of someone’s time, or once releases slow down because nobody is sure.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Software Engineer / Developer
- Technical Project Manager / Delivery Manager
- Backend Engineer / Back-End Developer
QA merges with release management and with support in a small team — all three are about what reaches the customer.
Keep separate from
The person who wrote it should not be the only person who decides it works.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Writes a bug report you can reproduce from
- Thinks in edge cases without being prompted
- Automates the boring half
Red flags
- Reports symptoms, not steps
- Only tests the happy path
- Treats automation as a substitute for thinking
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
Agencies need QA most and fund it least: a bug found after handover is argued about, and a bug found before is just work.
On a client contract
On a client contract, define acceptance criteria before the build. Most contract disputes in software are disagreements about what "done" meant.
In a product company
In a product company, automated coverage of the revenue path is the minimum, because you ship far more often than an agency does.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Management Software | Microsoft, Atlassian, Asana, Monday | The weakest in this research | The research → |
| Knowledge Management & Enterprise Search | Glean and Notion | — | The research → |