Level 01 · IC track
Junior Tester
Executes test cases, logs what broke, and builds the methodical habits that make everything else possible.
Also known as: QA Engineer I, Junior QA Analyst, Test Engineer, QA Trainee, Software TesterTypical experience: 0–2 years
Core responsibilities
- ›Execute manual test cases from an existing test plan, recording results accurately in a test management tool.
- ›Write defect reports with enough detail for a developer to reproduce the issue without additional questions.
- ›Participate in sprint ceremonies and raise questions about acceptance criteria before testing begins.
- ›Maintain existing automated test scripts under supervision — update selectors, refresh test data, re-run failures and triage results.
- ›Escalate blockers to senior team members rather than silently skipping test cases.
Soft skills
- ›Precise written communication — clear, reproducible defect reports are the primary output at this level.
- ›Patience with repetitive work: systematic testing is methodical by nature and that is a feature, not a flaw.
- ›Willingness to ask questions rather than make assumptions about expected behaviour.
Technical skills
- ›Functional testing basics: black-box techniques, equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis.Course
- ›Manual test case design: structured formats such as Given/When/Then and Step/Expected Result.Course
- ›Defect tracking: Jira, Azure DevOps, or similar — creating, triaging, and following up on defect tickets.
- ›Version control basics: cloning a repo, branching, pull requests, and resolving simple merge conflicts.Course
- ›Basic SQL: SELECT queries, simple JOINs, and verifying test data in a database.Course
- ›Basic API awareness: reading API documentation and understanding HTTP verbs, status codes, and response bodies.
- ›First steps toward automation: following an existing project structure, running tests locally, and reading test output.Roadmap
Junior Testers are still building the muscle. The entry point is curiosity, diligence, and a willingness to follow a process before having the experience to challenge it. The goal at this level isn't depth — it's reliability: thorough coverage, clear defect reports, and honest status reporting. You don't yet know what you don't know; a good Junior makes that obvious rather than hiding it.
Level 02 · IC track
Mid Tester
Designs coverage from requirements, owns automation for their features, and spots gaps before a single test is written.
Also known as: QA Engineer II, Test Engineer II, QA Analyst, Software Test Engineer, Associate SDETTypical experience: 2–4 years
Core responsibilities
- ›Design test coverage from requirements: identify what to test, what to skip, and why — rather than executing a plan handed to you.
- ›Write and maintain automated UI or API tests as part of the regular delivery cycle, not as a separate track.
- ›Contribute to test planning discussions and flag missing acceptance criteria before development starts.
- ›Review pull requests for testability issues and surface edge cases the developer may not have considered.
- ›Provide guidance to junior testers on defect report quality and test structure.
Soft skills
- ›Risk communication: clearly explaining which untested area matters most when time is short.
- ›Judgement on automation value — knowing when writing a test costs more than it saves.
- ›Self-direction: able to plan coverage for a feature without a checklist from a senior engineer.
Technical skills
- ›UI automation with Cypress: writing reliable end-to-end tests as part of the regular delivery cycle.Course
- ›UI automation with Playwright: cross-browser testing, fixtures, and parallel execution as feature delivery scales.Course
- ›API testing fundamentals: schema validation, authentication flows, and error-path coverage.Course
- ›Tool fluency: Postman for exploratory API testing, programmatic clients for automated regression.Course
- ›Moving from manual to automated coverage: identifying which manual tests warrant automation and which don't.Roadmap
- ›SQL basics: querying test databases to verify backend state and catch data integrity issues.
- ›CI fundamentals: running tests in a pipeline, reading build logs, and distinguishing flaky tests from genuine failures.Course
A Mid Tester doesn't just execute tests — they decide what to test. The step up from Junior is taking ownership of coverage: you look at a requirement and work out what can go wrong, not just what should work. You can design and automate tests for a feature from scratch rather than extending existing scripts. Gaps in requirements make you uncomfortable and you ask about them rather than test around them.
Level 03 · Branch point
Senior Tester
Sets the testing strategy for a product area, builds infrastructure others depend on, and carries weight in release decisions.
Also known as: Senior QA Engineer, QA Engineer III, Senior Test Engineer, Senior SDET, Senior Test AnalystTypical experience: 4–7 years
Core responsibilities
- ›Own the test strategy for one or more product areas — what to test, at which level, with what tooling, and why.
- ›Design test frameworks and shared utilities that other engineers build on rather than reinvent.
- ›Influence release decisions: your read on test health and risk carries weight in go/no-go calls.
- ›Identify systemic quality gaps and propose solutions — not just flag individual defects.
- ›Lead retrospectives on escaped defects and drive process improvements that change behaviour next quarter.
Soft skills
- ›Technical influence without authority: making developers care about testability before the sprint starts.
- ›Strategic prioritisation: saying no to low-ROI automation is as valuable as saying yes.
- ›Mentoring without creating dependency — helping mid and junior engineers grow rather than solving problems for them.
Technical skills
- ›Advanced automation architecture: page object patterns, fixtures, custom commands, and shared utilities others can build on.Course
- ›Performance and load testing awareness: able to instrument a feature and establish a baseline before release.Course
- ›API contract testing and integration testing patterns: catching integration breakages before they reach production.Course
- ›CI/CD pipeline ownership: test stage configuration, flake tracking, and parallelisation strategy.Course
- ›Observability basics: reading logs and distributed traces to diagnose flaky tests and narrow down production failures.
A Senior chooses what to test based on risk and impact, not based on what's easy or what's already in the test plan. They design infrastructure that others use without them. Their judgement carries weight in release decisions — not because of tenure, but because the team has learned their read is usually right. The step from Mid to Senior is moving from 'I can automate this' to 'I can tell you whether automating this is the right call, and why.'
The branch. From Senior, the ladder forks into two tracks. The next two cards continue the IC path — Staff/Principal, then Test Architect. After that, the Management track begins with QA Lead and climbs through Manager, Director, and VP. Both are senior tracks; neither is ‘above’ the other. Track choice is about what you want to spend your hours on — deep technical work or leading people and outcomes.
Level 04 · IC track
Staff / Principal Tester
Solves quality problems that span multiple teams — the technical gaps that no individual team has the context or authority to close alone.
Also known as: Staff Tester, Principal QA, Lead SDET, Member of Technical Staff (MTS), Principal Test EngineerTypical experience: 7–12 years
Core responsibilities
- ›Define quality standards and testing patterns adopted across multiple teams or the whole engineering organisation.
- ›Identify systemic reliability risks — flakiness patterns, contract coverage gaps, untested failure modes — and drive resolution across team boundaries.
- ›Partner with engineering leadership on technical strategy decisions that affect test complexity or system testability.
- ›Evaluate and introduce new testing tools and frameworks at an organisational level, with long-term maintenance in mind.
- ›Mentor Senior engineers toward Staff-level thinking: cross-cutting problems, not just feature coverage.
Soft skills
- ›Comfort with ambiguity: defining the problem is often harder than solving it at this level.
- ›Organisational navigation: influencing engineering practices across team boundaries without direct authority.
- ›Written communication for a senior audience: proposals, ADRs, and post-mortems that engineering leadership acts on.
Technical skills
- ›Test infrastructure at scale: shared test utilities, custom runners, and test reporting platforms used across multiple teams.Roadmap
- ›AI-augmented testing workflows: generative test data, LLM-based assertion helpers, and AI-assisted exploratory testing.Course
- ›AI-driven browser automation: Playwright MCP for letting agents drive test runs and exploratory sessions.Course
- ›AI pair-programming for test infrastructure: Claude Code for refactoring frameworks, writing tests, and debugging failures.Course
- ›Testing AI/ML systems: evaluating model quality, regression on LLM outputs, and safety guardrail validation.AI
- ›Distributed systems testing: event-driven architectures, message queue contracts, and service mesh observability.
- ›Quality metrics definition: choosing signals that reflect real product risk rather than just test run counts.
A Staff/Principal Tester owns the quality problems that fall between team boundaries — the issues each individual team can see only partially from their own vantage point. The signal that you're at this level is when you consistently identify cross-cutting gaps that others miss, and when your solutions get adopted rather than parked. Technical depth is still required, but it's in service of organisational problems, not individual features.
Level 05 · IC track
Test Architect
Shapes the technical foundations of quality — the tools, patterns, and platforms that define how the entire engineering organisation tests software.
Also known as: Quality Architect, Test Platform Engineer, Principal Test Architect, Staff Quality EngineerTypical experience: 10+ years
Core responsibilities
- ›Design and own the test platform: shared libraries, custom runners, CI integration, and test reporting infrastructure at organisational scale.
- ›Set engineering standards for test code across the organisation — documented in ADRs, enforced through tooling and code review.
- ›Evaluate and adopt new testing technologies: not proof-of-concepts, but production-grade decisions with long-term maintenance implications.
- ›Partner with engineering leadership on architectural decisions that affect system testability at the design stage, before code is written.
- ›Represent the quality engineering function in cross-organisational technical forums and architectural review boards.
Soft skills
- ›Technical vision: making architectural decisions that remain defensible years after the context that prompted them has changed.
- ›Communicating complex trade-offs to engineering leadership and non-technical stakeholders without oversimplifying.
- ›Build vs buy vs adopt: able to evaluate open source, vendor, and in-house options and defend the choice long-term.
Technical skills
- ›Test platform engineering: building and owning internal frameworks, from runner configuration to reporting pipelines.Roadmap
- ›Advanced observability: distributed tracing, structured logging, and test telemetry pipelines.
- ›AI-augmented testing at scale: self-healing selectors, generative test case maintenance, and LLM evaluation frameworks.Roadmap
- ›Testing AI/ML systems: evaluation frameworks, regression on model outputs, and quality guardrails in ML pipelines.AI
- ›Mobile and cross-platform testing architecture: device farm strategy, emulator trade-offs, and cloud device grid integration.Roadmap
Test Architects don't test features — they define the conditions under which features get tested. The signal that you're at this level is when decisions you made two or three years ago are still the right ones, when engineers across the organisation rely on frameworks you built without needing you to explain them, and when new tooling decisions get escalated to you because your judgement is trusted more than the vendor's pitch deck. This is the IC terminal rung: depth is the advantage.
// Management track
Level 06 · Mgmt track
QA Lead
Runs a QA team — hiring, development, delivery ownership, and bridging technical quality strategy with product and engineering management.
Also known as: QA Team Lead, Test Lead, Engineering Manager (QA), Quality Lead, Test ManagerTypical experience: 6–10 years
Core responsibilities
- ›Manage a team of 3–8 QA engineers: regular 1:1s, performance reviews, hiring, and individual development plans.
- ›Own the team's delivery commitments — scope quality work into sprint planning and defend time for it.
- ›Set quality expectations with product managers and engineering leads for the team's product area.
- ›Remove blockers for the team, including escalating cross-team quality issues the team cannot resolve alone.
- ›Run retrospectives on escaped defects and drive process changes that reduce recurrence quarter-on-quarter.
Soft skills
- ›Candid feedback delivery — upward and downward, early rather than held for the quarterly review.
- ›Holding the line on quality without becoming a bottleneck to delivery.
- ›Building psychological safety: defects are system failures, not individual ones.
- ›Managing up: communicating quality risk clearly to non-technical stakeholders in business terms.
Technical skills
- ›Test strategy: able to write and defend a risk-based testing strategy document for a product area.
- ›Quality metrics: defect escape rate, cycle time, flakiness trends — reading the signal rather than the raw number.
- ›CI/CD pipeline basics: enough depth to diagnose build failures and advise on pipeline structure for the team.Course
- ›Code review for test quality: identifying architectural problems in the team's automation code without needing to write all of it.Roadmap
A QA Lead's leverage is through the team, not through their own testing. The shift from Senior is accepting that your output is now measured by what your team delivers, not the tests you personally write. You're effective at this level when engineers on your team are growing, blockers get resolved before they become crises, and quality standards are upheld without you needing to be in every room.
Level 07 · Mgmt track
QA Manager
Leads multiple QA teams or a significant testing function, translating quality goals into team structure, hiring strategy, and measurable outcomes.
Also known as: Quality Manager, Manager of Software Quality, Senior QA Manager, Engineering Manager II (Quality)Typical experience: 8–14 years
Core responsibilities
- ›Manage QA Leads and senior engineers — multiply their effectiveness through clearer priorities, better processes, and active career development.
- ›Define the quality strategy for a product domain or engineering division, not just a single team.
- ›Own team headcount planning, tooling budget, and capacity allocation for quality activities across teams.
- ›Drive cross-team quality improvements: shared standards, consolidated test infrastructure, and consistent defect triage processes.
- ›Report quality health to senior engineering and product leadership with trend data, not anecdote.
Soft skills
- ›Building managers: coaching QA Leads toward their own effectiveness as people managers.
- ›Cross-functional negotiation: defending quality investment against product velocity pressure with data.
- ›Programme-level communication: writing quality reports that influence product roadmap and resourcing decisions.
- ›Hiring for complementary skills: building a team with range, not just more of the same profile.
Technical skills
- ›Quality metrics at programme level: defect escape trends, automation coverage ratios, and time-to-detect across multiple teams.
- ›Test infrastructure economics: cost/benefit analysis for platform investment and tooling consolidation decisions.
- ›Sufficient technical depth to evaluate the quality of work by engineering leads and identify risks before they escalate.Roadmap
A QA Manager sets quality strategy above individual teams. The step from QA Lead is moving from 'I run a team' to 'I define how quality works across teams.' You have opinions on team topology, tool consolidation, and where the organisation is under-investing — and you can make a credible business case for each. Your direct reports are themselves leading people, which means your primary job is growing leaders, not engineers.
Level 08 · Mgmt track
Director of Quality
Defines what quality means at an organisational level — the standards, culture, and infrastructure that determine whether the whole engineering organisation ships reliably.
Also known as: Director of QA, Director of Engineering (Quality), Head of QA, Head of Quality EngineeringTypical experience: 12+ years
Core responsibilities
- ›Own the quality engineering function across multiple product domains — not a single team but an organisation-wide discipline.
- ›Set the quality culture: what does 'good' look like for a release, a defect escape rate, a test suite health score?
- ›Drive executive-level decisions: which quality investments get funded, which technical debt gets prioritised, which tools the organisation adopts.
- ›Build and develop QA Managers and principal-level engineers into effective leaders.
- ›Partner with the CTO, VPE, and product leadership on release strategy, quality gates, and major incident response.
Soft skills
- ›Executive communication: translating quality engineering health into business risk language for non-technical stakeholders.
- ›Organisational design: structuring QA teams for effective collaboration with product and engineering.
- ›Change management: shifting quality culture in an organisation that hasn't historically valued it.
- ›Budget ownership: articulating ROI on quality investment to finance and senior leadership.
Technical skills
- ›Quality programme design: how to structure testing across a multi-team, multi-product engineering organisation.
- ›Incident analysis and post-mortem culture: systemic root cause identification rather than individual blame.
- ›Modern testing architecture: enough depth to evaluate proposals from Staff and Architect-level engineers and ask the right questions.Roadmap
Directors shape quality culture across the organisation rather than within individual teams or products. The signal at this level is systemic influence: when the CTO cites quality metrics in all-hands, when engineers push back on shipping with insufficient coverage, when QA engineers have a visible career path and the function isn't losing its best people to attrition. The lever is culture, not code — though you still need enough depth to know when you're being misled about technical trade-offs.
Level 09 · Mgmt track
VP Engineering, quality-aligned
Holds executive accountability for engineering quality across the organisation — the practices, culture, and tooling that determine whether the company ships reliably at scale.
Also known as: VP of Quality, VP of QA Engineering, SVP Quality, VP Engineering (Quality Platform)Typical experience: 15+ years
Core responsibilities
- ›Set the organisational quality vision: what quality means for the company's product strategy, customer commitments, and engineering culture.
- ›Own the quality engineering budget and team structure across the full engineering organisation.
- ›Partner with the CEO, CTO, and board-level stakeholders on incident disclosure, reliability commitments, and quality-related risk.
- ›Define the company's approach to AI-era quality challenges: LLM evaluation frameworks, self-healing infrastructure, and safety guardrails at scale.
- ›Attract, develop, and retain senior quality engineering talent — Directors, Test Architects, and Staff Engineers.
Soft skills
- ›Board-level communication: translating engineering quality into business risk, investor narrative, and compliance language.
- ›External credibility: representing the organisation's quality standards to customers, partners, and regulators.
- ›Strategic patience: building quality culture takes years; knowing which changes to force in year one and which to earn over time.
- ›Executive hiring: building and retaining a leadership team beneath you with complementary strengths.
Technical skills
- ›Organisational reliability and SLO frameworks: defining and owning engineering-wide quality SLAs and error budgets.
- ›AI-augmented quality at enterprise scale: evaluating and adopting AI testing tools across a large engineering organisation.Roadmap
- ›Testing AI/ML at a product level: the intersection of quality engineering and ML system reliability at scale.AI
At VP level, you're no longer responsible for quality in any one product or team — you're accountable for the organisation's ability to maintain quality as it scales. The step from Director is altitude: M&A technical due diligence, board-level SLA commitments, organisational design across hundreds of engineers. You may not review code, but you must be able to evaluate the quality of decisions made by the leaders who report to you — and know when they're wrong.
// How to read this ladder
This is a reference, not a prescription. Title conventions vary across companies — the same responsibilities can appear under five different job titles depending on an organisation's size and structure. The differentiator field is the most useful part of each level: it answers 'why am I not yet the next rung?' more honestly than years of experience ever can. The fork at Senior isn't a one-way door — engineers move between IC and management tracks mid-career, and that's a healthy sign, not a failure.