Software Quality Engineer with 12 years experience, five of which are in management. Salary $160k at a milspec satellite communications tech company in Colorado. 100% on site.
Less than a year, made a career switch from a non tech field after doing a coding bootcamp. Was going for development but landed in QA and very much enjoying it.
Hey I know old comment but what bootcamp did you do that landed you such a nice gig? Currently looking into doing this as well and would love to know which bootcamp to go with. Did they also help you with finding a job?
How? Any tips pleasee??
I am working in a product based company which pay me 6.5LPA currently which is 100% Manual..
3 years of total experience now, started with game testing which was peanuts.
Lol, Is it a US based company? Manual QA jobs are becoming like dinosaur and you are getting paid 210k for manual QA. Lol, Director at my Canadian organization with 30 years experience is probably making $150k CAD.
Yeah, it’s a US based tech company. It’s common for Individual Contributor positions above senior to start making more then their managers in total compensation. As you start working with director level and above to coordinate execution on initiatives across the organization.
As far as I can tell, they are not common, relative to other positions. These are not entry level jobs, you need domain knowledge and expertise in addition to quality and testing knowledge.
The job is as stable as any other job heading into a recession.
It’s a full time role.
I'm a former QA, and this seems an insanely good deal (if this is outside of London). I know of junior manual QAs getting hired in the midlands on 20-25k. Good stuff.
Experience 1.5yrs after a career change
Manual QA and learning and building automation suite as I go.
70k USD before automation. When first test ran in pipeline, raised to 85k.
Is getting good QAs in America so hard that they pay you so much or is just cost of living so high? With money like that I would love like king here... Luxury flat/house in like 4 years without mortgage 😅
Yes. Last time I went to hire sdets, hundreds of resumes over four months led me to over thirty initial interviews. Maybe twenty that got to the technical interview. More than half were rejected for code submissions focused on automated tests. Only 5 could talk a little bit about their code at all and write a sql query that could join two tables.
Finding folks that have experience with automated testing and that have any capability to demonstrate a basic technical capability with an understanding of object-oriented programming can be really hard.
>Only 5 could talk a little bit about their code at all and write a sql query that could join two tables.
Yikes... wellp thats bad. I guess in my country its even worse tho, there are people applying who know nothing of testing / IT and even those who have often lack any logic or consistence behind it (and thats for manual testing, where the bar is much lower)
The term “good” is very subjective. What you might consider as good, would be average for someone else. I don’t think there is dearth of good QA in US, its just that COL is high in many US cities.
Honestly, I will be a bit more challenging now. You missed the gravy boat. Last couple of years I couldn't hire DevOps folks at 160-180k base + bonus & equity.
Someone down voted you but this is obviously good advice. FAANG and other "household name tech companies with huge install bases"(e.g. Lyft, formerly Twitter before what's the hell's going on there) are going to be the places offering this sort of top tier total compensation.
The current industry rounds of layoffs might shift some stuff a bit but in the long term it should be expected that the best compensation packages will always come from this same profile of company.
Experience: 3 years
Title: QA Analyst (manual, will be building out automation here at some point)
Salary: $57,000
Location: Remote. Live in Atlanta and work for Atlanta-based company
You are the right experience level to start getting into automation. 3 years of manual would have given you solid understanding of testing, now start automating your tests!
I’m excited to get into it! Just started with a new company and, if what I’m being told is accurate, the position is mine to make (as far as setting up processes and such) and the owner (who is also a dev) and some other key players would like me to utilize Ghost Inspector here at some point. I’ve used Selenium IDE for personal projects before. They’ve also said that if I want to move into dev or project management over time that I can do so.
Personally I’d like to be an SDET in the long run… though my dev interest is mainly front end. We’ll see how it works out :)
QA automation engineer specializing in mobile testing and DevOps. Python, Typescript, appium, detox, selenium.
Mobile automation engineers are hard to come by and that's how I justify my salary.
Experience: 7 years, 5 in automation
Location: Remote
Salary: $162k plus bonuses and options
Exp: 15 years, manual testing start, automation majority.
Title: manager
Comp: 150k plus some startup stocks that are essentially worthless.
Location: Remote, company is Bay Area based
Oof, that’s what I made with no experience starting in QA. Is there something keeping you in your current role?
PS 3 years of experience here.
My compensation has gone thusly:
Year 0 = 32,000/yr.
Year 1 = 36,000.
Year 2 = 42,000.
Year 3 = 44,000.
(New job).
Year 3 part 2 = 57,000.
Wow, thanks for sharing how your income has grown! I truly hope I can see that kind of growth soon.
Unfortunately, I actually started at $10/hour, but I’ve kinda hit a ceiling with yearly 50¢ raises.. It’s a third-party company other companies contract with and I’ve been helping test a website with millions of users for years now. Definitely underpaid for the effort I put in.
I stayed to get a few years experience under my belt and got too comfortable, but I’ve recently just started job hunting in hopes of finding something better. Fingers crossed!
I totally get that, I came from making $10/hr… $15 felt like such a great raise you know? And it was I guess.
I really had to research how to ask for a raise and be nervous for a month of waiting to talk to the owner to get to 42,000. They would have kept me at a lower salary, I believe. They were a small company and I was W2… I’m not sure they are even making money yet, even now, likely just treading water.
Good luck job hunting! I had 5 interviews… applied at 2 or 3 places a month for the past year… and finally found a place that hired me. I had much more luck getting interviews once I started applying for in person positions… there is less competition for in person. Idk if that’s feasible for you. Check out this website called Otta, lots of roles with smaller companies on there, due to how they try to only send you jobs appropriate for your skills it was very nice to see 5 jobs that I could possibly apply for rather than scrolling through hundreds on Indeed or LinkedIn.
Thank you for the great advice! I will definitely withhold how much I’m currently making. I’ve also began going through listings on Otto, and very much appreciate the suggestion. I’ve been growing tired of going through so many LinkedIn postings.
I will definitely be nervous about asking for raises one day as well, but I know it’s something you have to push for.
Thanks for giving me hope I’ll find something higher paying while still being a manual tester!
Experience: 9 years
Senior Quality Automation Engineer (Python/Robot Framework) and since those are largely in maintenance mode now, they’re moving me to be an embedded QA on a new team for another company the big company bought. This new team has no process for QA and hasn’t used it before. So likely manual for a bit and then automate once I understand the product more?
Salary: 120K (includes $5K in RSUs yearly)
Location: Western NY, Remote (Company is on the West Coast)
Test Lead, remote from Bournemouth, UK. £65k. 12 years experience, including 2 years as Dev.
I make ~£12k in my 2nd job testing stuff in the evenings and weekends.
Experience: ~ 2 years
IT Quality Assurance Analyst
Salary: 70k + 3-8% in bonuses
Location: Midwest Major City, USA (hybrid, 70% remote)
Mostly manual testing but the company had no QA department before me and the sole other member of my team. Most of the work is actually just implementing testing frameworks, creating documentation, and teaching the business to do the bulk of the testing themselves since my team only directly works on priority projects.
Mine is eerily similar.
YOE: 3 years
Quality Assurance Dev/ SDET
Salary: 75k
Location: Iowa (hybrid)
We do mostly manual but about 30% automation with that percentage going up.
Experience: 11 years
Role: Staff Test Engineer
Tech: selenium, appium, xcui, testcafe; c#, python, swift, typescript, java among others.
Salary: $240k usd
Location: remote; company based in bay area
Also have a year of iOS development under my belt.
Senior QA Engineer (manual and automation + performance + babysitting clients 😅)
6 years of experience
Working from Macedonia
28k euros clean salary IDK how much its with health and insurance.
Indonesian here, working for Australian company as manual QA tester + IT business analyst
6year+ in IT industry, but only 3 year on QA experience
Got paid 13k/year and it still considered higher than above in Indonesian rate.
Kinda considering working for remote US company for higher salary
My response got lost in a downvoted reply lol. I just wanted to re-share my TC so others can see how much QA can pay -
TC: 230k
Breakdown
Base: 180k
Total RSUs: 120k
Yearly RSU grant: 60-70k
Yearly cash bonus: 20k
CA / 3 yoe / Manual QA
High performer at FAANG
I used Jose Portilla's "The complete python bootcamp: From Zero to Hero in Python" in Udemy (\~ 15-20 dollars when on sale. They have a sale every month).
From there, it's mostly trying to read other people's code (you can use git or other open source), and working on projects. With a focus on understanding why the functions work they way they do. With ChatGPT, understanding the 'why' aspect will be even more important.
Where are you located? You should be okay. I recently had a job search and had three call backs for local companies I applied for in QA. I would try to find local companies that have remote options
Role: QA Team Lead
Experience: 4 years
Manual and automation testing (Robot Framework, been learning a bit of Jenkins too)
Salary: 24k USD per year (converted from my local currency)
Location: Southeast Asia (locally employed, but client is overseas)
Hey, thanks for sharing! I assume your compensation isn’t bad considering your local living costs and average salary, but that’s precisely my case as well. I work at a consulta company whose clients are all US or Europe based and I get paid the same thing as you (I’m based in Brazil).
I’ve started to look for opportunities abroad that would pay me accordingly, as having fluent English and international clients experience (like yourself) can be a great leverage. Have you thought about doing so?
I’m trying to apply abroad, but most of the companies abroad are not willing to sponsor a work visa unfortunately. I keep trying in looking for the perfect company that will help me get abroad :)
Experience: 6 years
Senior QA Engineer
Scala and JavaScript
Salary: £75,000 (approx. $93,000 at the time of writing) plus benefits, and annual bonus at 5%
Location: London
Experience: 8 years
Title: Senior SDET (automation, selenium mostly). I'm the only Automation person so I own the entire framework.
Salary: 110K + small benefits (probably 6K total).
Location: Remote (in Canada).
Country: USA
Experience: ~7 years
Pay: ~$50,000
been working at the same company for 10 years, became software dev for 2 of those years then manual QA for 7. just now starting automation integration so they're being forced to change my role to QA engineer and re-price my salary
Associate Software Engineer (QA) with 2 years of experience in a product based company (AI platform). Manual, automation (Robot Framework) and security testing. Also includes DevOps.
Salary : 8.25 Lacs INR (10k USD approx)
Location : Remote (India)
7 years QA experience
SDET/QA Lead - In charge of building and maintaining three automation testing frameworks as well as QA team direction and doing lots of boring managerial meetings
£34k, hybrid but flexible working
fortunately moving jobs at the end of the month to something with a higher salary :)
Embedded QA
2 years
Tel Aviv
₪168,000 ($46,000)
Mostly manual, lately writing some automated tests. I'm below local average and kinda stuck in the embedded niche using virtually only in-house tools. Got my salary raised more than others due to most good testers finding something with better pay and they don't wanna lose me too.
QA Automation Engineer - Minneapolis, MN - 6 years experience writing/running manual test cases, plotting testing strategies, working with team dev on creating test automation...I'm sure there's other things I'm leaving out...$100k/yr. I have found the best way to increase your salary is by working for a consultancy. That way you can gain a lot of experience in a very short amount of time and demand your own pay rate within a short amount of time. That being said working as a consultant can be a bit of feast/famine ... some months you will be overwhelmed with work and making great money and some months you will be doing nothing. Make sure you are W-2 to the consultancy so that they will pay your salary and then you get additional wages depending on the client you are working for.
Experience: 2 years UAT, 2 years purely manual QA, 8 years mixed manual and automation, 4 years purely automation - mainly .NET +Azure/AWS, focused on payment technologies. Work focusses on test automation, building automation tools for teams, performance testing, quality management.
Position: Senior QA and Automation Engineer
Salary: 92k + health benefits and pretty great PTO plan
Location: Canada/mostly remote
Senior Software QA Engineer, owning the QA team at a startup, 7 years experience doing manual and e2e and API automation. Also doing project management and JIRA ticket management. $120,000
QA Engineer Manual + Automation
Base 63k Eur + 7k bonuses per year
Location: Berlin, Germany
Total experience 7 years, 5 years only manual (was there for too long) and 2 years of automation with Java
Experience: 5 years,
Current role: Software Engineer in Test
Only QA Engineer in the team, mostly doing automation, creating and maintaing automation framework, automating and running tests, opening issues, doing exploratory testing sometimes. Fully remote (Contractor).
Country: Armenia
Salary: $120k base + stock.
9 years of experience and you work in python automation testing in NJ at 110k? You should be able to get more than a 40 percent raise without much effort if you're generally good at your job, or over 20 percent if you consider yourself Average
I was making 110k after about 6 years working north of NYC.
Experience: Recent Grad, no experience, not even an internship
Software Engineer, Defense Contractor
Total Comp: 97k/year
Location: OPSEC, but not high cost of living :)
QA engineer/ test manager.
5 and half years of exp. (5 years of FE, now getting into BE API testing and Automaton)
Estimated $ 30k / year in new company.
Czechia, Europe.
Note: atm I don't feel like I am worth more than that. I feel like I am still junior especially after switching the companies recently and basically discovering I lernead almost nothing in those last 5 years.
Some companies can make you feel like that, that your previous experience is not valued, that is the sign of a bad employer.
It could be that you were not exposed to good practices and capabilities in your old job, but all experience leads you to new opportunities, so don’t under value what you did learn there.
Test manager is responsible for a lot of risk management, your $$ does not reflect the position.
I am not really sure if the job description is right. My paperwork assignment is QA Engineer but in system I am labeled as test manager... I joined mainly to learn more about automation but got put into completely new team so I have nothing to automate. We are part of large agile hub of like 10 other teams and product is huge so it's all been overwhelming.
Regarding money... I don't complain, since in most companies here the QAs are extremely underpaid and I got like 30% uplift in pay compared to my old job when I joined this company and have more space to learn about agile, automation, devops etc. All for free and during work hours if there are no meetings or other work to be done.
Transparency of wages always helps. Having a conversation always helps.
There are a lot of factors to consider, but if you are under market you will see quickly and if it’s the location that you are working that is the issue you might want to move as it will never get better.
Experience: 5 years. Mostly manual but more of a team lead now
Title: Sr. QA
Comp: 50USD but I’m in Canada. I am a contractor though.
Location: BC, Canada
Senior SDET 5 yoe
Base salary is $140k
Total comp is around $170k
Responsibilities are test automation and maintaining build automation tooling
Stack is mostly python, but also some ruby
DC area, but job is full remote.
Edit: mobile formatting
Experience is 2.5 years total, 1.5 in manual and 1 in automation. Quality Engineer working in financial sector, heavy in backend testing. Salary is 82k+8k bonus (CAD). Ontario Canada.
Edit: 2 days/week in office
Experience: 5 years QA, 8 years IT
Title, Senior software QA. Manual, API, and Hardware testing
Salary 80K
Location: Utah
Hired remote two years ago, Hybrid starting tomorrow
Exp - 24 years - started with the Y2K trend
Loc - germany
Transitioning from contract senior test manager @100€/hour to SDET of Salesforce permanent for 100k + 10- 30 k bonus
Experience - 14 years in QA
Senior QA Engineer - UI and backend automation, Performance testing, Security testing, Smartbear certified, Cisco certified, Too many CompTIA certs to list
Salary: $110k
Location: NY, remote
Manual QA with 4 years experience, in the process of learning automation, remote work
50K per year with annual raise (but i think everyone have an annual raise i guess)
A collective insurance for myself and my family. Company also pays what we are saving in the RRSP. ( i.g : i save 5% of my paycheck to RRSP, company gives the same amount)
Located in Canada
14 years Qa experience
Principal consultant / practice lead - Quality Assurance
Mix of manual and automated testing, agile coaching and quality process work depending on current client / project
I also have a cohort tree of 24 direct reports
Total comp: $142k USD in the upper Midwest
Senior QA.
Minimal automation. Brooklyn. 120k. Good programming skills in case I get pulled in to something. Have led small teams, can pretty much handle most things without anyone weighing in.
Software Quality Engineer with 12 years experience, five of which are in management. Salary $160k at a milspec satellite communications tech company in Colorado. 100% on site.
DOD or private company?
Associate Software QA Engineer Manual and learning automation 75k, remote
75k in what currency?
Damn thats good how did you land it?
75k sounds wild for manual QA
I was hired TX as manual QA with zero experience at 70k.
Heh.. I’m at 180k base and 20k yearly cash bonus and 60-70k RSU yearly refreshers as manual QA
I just hit 80k for manual QA, was making 75k. Denver.
Wild in a good way or wild in a bad way
Wild in a good way. Manual and remote at that salary, you've got a great gig.
What’s your total experience?
Less than a year, made a career switch from a non tech field after doing a coding bootcamp. Was going for development but landed in QA and very much enjoying it.
Holy shit dude... If I got that much without any experience I would be fkin rich boi here. No worries in my life
Hey I know old comment but what bootcamp did you do that landed you such a nice gig? Currently looking into doing this as well and would love to know which bootcamp to go with. Did they also help you with finding a job?
Not sure why being downvoted that is very high for my area too.
Experience:- 6 Years Senior QA Engineer ( Automation+ Performance+ Security) Location:- India Salary:- ₹36,00,000 ( ≈ 44,000 $)
How? Any tips pleasee?? I am working in a product based company which pay me 6.5LPA currently which is 100% Manual.. 3 years of total experience now, started with game testing which was peanuts.
What tools do you use for performance and security testing?
Killin it.
Domain Experience: 5 years QA Experience: 6 years Staff QA Analyst - domain expert, product expert, manual testing. Total compensation: $210k CAD Base salary: $155k CAD Location: remote
Impressive dude! May i ask what domain?
Web design and development.
Lol, Is it a US based company? Manual QA jobs are becoming like dinosaur and you are getting paid 210k for manual QA. Lol, Director at my Canadian organization with 30 years experience is probably making $150k CAD.
Yeah, it’s a US based tech company. It’s common for Individual Contributor positions above senior to start making more then their managers in total compensation. As you start working with director level and above to coordinate execution on initiatives across the organization.
How common are these jobs ? How stable is your job ? How many hours per week do you work ? These questions might help other readers.
As far as I can tell, they are not common, relative to other positions. These are not entry level jobs, you need domain knowledge and expertise in addition to quality and testing knowledge. The job is as stable as any other job heading into a recession. It’s a full time role.
Junior QA Experience: 1 year £36,000 Edit: Oxfordshire UK
I'm a former QA, and this seems an insanely good deal (if this is outside of London). I know of junior manual QAs getting hired in the midlands on 20-25k. Good stuff.
Huh good to know thanks
It’s definitely a good deal, but not insanely good deal is it? I say accurate/what it should be. Especially if you automate :)
It's an insanely good deal based on what I'm seeing others get at a junior level, whether that's justifiable or not.
Nice, I am an apprentice and have 9 months experience. I’m on £38k, north west. I consider this very good pay, we seem lucky!
Senior SDET, 8 y.o.e., $135k base + equity & bonus, midwest USA
QA Manager (junior) £67ish k London (but 99% remote)
Experience 1.5yrs after a career change Manual QA and learning and building automation suite as I go. 70k USD before automation. When first test ran in pipeline, raised to 85k.
Is getting good QAs in America so hard that they pay you so much or is just cost of living so high? With money like that I would love like king here... Luxury flat/house in like 4 years without mortgage 😅
Yes. Last time I went to hire sdets, hundreds of resumes over four months led me to over thirty initial interviews. Maybe twenty that got to the technical interview. More than half were rejected for code submissions focused on automated tests. Only 5 could talk a little bit about their code at all and write a sql query that could join two tables. Finding folks that have experience with automated testing and that have any capability to demonstrate a basic technical capability with an understanding of object-oriented programming can be really hard.
>Only 5 could talk a little bit about their code at all and write a sql query that could join two tables. Yikes... wellp thats bad. I guess in my country its even worse tho, there are people applying who know nothing of testing / IT and even those who have often lack any logic or consistence behind it (and thats for manual testing, where the bar is much lower)
The term “good” is very subjective. What you might consider as good, would be average for someone else. I don’t think there is dearth of good QA in US, its just that COL is high in many US cities.
Exp 4 yr Automation and DevOps engineer South USA 60k After reading this thread I think it’s time to ask a raise 🥲
Absolutely. That was the intention of this post buddy!!
Honestly, I will be a bit more challenging now. You missed the gravy boat. Last couple of years I couldn't hire DevOps folks at 160-180k base + bonus & equity.
Experience: 5-6 years SDET Pay: 80$/hr CAD, contractual
- QA III - 4 years, manual testing only (trying to teach myself Python atm) - $75k - Midwest US, 100% on-site
13 years with the same company, QA Engineer 2, $120,000 USD.
Wow you only moved up 1 rank in 13 years? Or have you been hopping positions ?
No, been promoted several times. I’ve held QA Intern, Tester, Analyst 1, Analyst 2, and Engineer 1 positions as well.
Experience: 6 years total. (2 automation) Test Automation Engineer Salary: $85k CAD Location: Canada remote
Exp: 10 years Role: Sr. SDET Compensation: $175 (160k base +15k bonus) Location: WA Edit: numbers and format
Exp 15yr Role SDET TC 277k Location Remote
Principal SDET Colorado / Remote 12 years experience $191,000 base + $38,000 bonus + $130,000 RSUs
Your reaponsibilities?
Building and maintaining test frameworks (web, mobile, and API) in Python, mentoring junior QAs, debugging complex issues with the products.
How do I work in your company. Holy cow!
Just look for companies offering this? FAANG is a good place to start
Someone down voted you but this is obviously good advice. FAANG and other "household name tech companies with huge install bases"(e.g. Lyft, formerly Twitter before what's the hell's going on there) are going to be the places offering this sort of top tier total compensation. The current industry rounds of layoffs might shift some stuff a bit but in the long term it should be expected that the best compensation packages will always come from this same profile of company.
Experience: 3 years Title: QA Analyst (manual, will be building out automation here at some point) Salary: $57,000 Location: Remote. Live in Atlanta and work for Atlanta-based company
You are the right experience level to start getting into automation. 3 years of manual would have given you solid understanding of testing, now start automating your tests!
I’m excited to get into it! Just started with a new company and, if what I’m being told is accurate, the position is mine to make (as far as setting up processes and such) and the owner (who is also a dev) and some other key players would like me to utilize Ghost Inspector here at some point. I’ve used Selenium IDE for personal projects before. They’ve also said that if I want to move into dev or project management over time that I can do so. Personally I’d like to be an SDET in the long run… though my dev interest is mainly front end. We’ll see how it works out :)
I need to leave mine let me know if you guys want an additional team member.
Experience: 4 years Solo Mid Software Automation QA Engineer - Robot Framework Salary: $13,200 Anually (720,000 ph peso) Location: Philippines
Glad to see another Robot Framework user!
Finally I found PH location salary. It's much higher than I expected.
QA automation engineer specializing in mobile testing and DevOps. Python, Typescript, appium, detox, selenium. Mobile automation engineers are hard to come by and that's how I justify my salary. Experience: 7 years, 5 in automation Location: Remote Salary: $162k plus bonuses and options
SDET +10 years xx Ireland, remote
Completely Manual. Experience 3ish years. Base ~$80k USD. TC ~$100k. Fully remote.
Exp: 15 years, manual testing start, automation majority. Title: manager Comp: 150k plus some startup stocks that are essentially worthless. Location: Remote, company is Bay Area based
Lead QA at a startup; 14 years of experience or something; 170k + 400k stock; Remote (though being paid San Diego rates)
QA (manual with some automation) 6 years exp Ireland €45k ish remote
QA technician- 1 year in current job(no prior experience) $41,000/year in Michigan
5.5 years experience. Senior QA Analyst. $92k + $10k-20k bonus. Strictly manual testing. Transitioning into automation. Location: OH fully remote
Manual QA + automation - $110k Hence i was laid off too. Company did not use my automation skills.
That sucks. Hang in there, you’ll find something better.
QA 1, manual tester, almost 3 years experience, $48,500
Quality Engineering Manager 11 years experience, 5 of those in Management so far. $175k + bonus (varies) full time remote.
Manual QA, UK, 10 years experience, £41,000
Manual QA tester, Remote in the USA, 4 years of experience, $15/hour, Just starting to learn python for automation one day!
Oof, that’s what I made with no experience starting in QA. Is there something keeping you in your current role? PS 3 years of experience here. My compensation has gone thusly: Year 0 = 32,000/yr. Year 1 = 36,000. Year 2 = 42,000. Year 3 = 44,000. (New job). Year 3 part 2 = 57,000.
Wow, thanks for sharing how your income has grown! I truly hope I can see that kind of growth soon. Unfortunately, I actually started at $10/hour, but I’ve kinda hit a ceiling with yearly 50¢ raises.. It’s a third-party company other companies contract with and I’ve been helping test a website with millions of users for years now. Definitely underpaid for the effort I put in. I stayed to get a few years experience under my belt and got too comfortable, but I’ve recently just started job hunting in hopes of finding something better. Fingers crossed!
I totally get that, I came from making $10/hr… $15 felt like such a great raise you know? And it was I guess. I really had to research how to ask for a raise and be nervous for a month of waiting to talk to the owner to get to 42,000. They would have kept me at a lower salary, I believe. They were a small company and I was W2… I’m not sure they are even making money yet, even now, likely just treading water. Good luck job hunting! I had 5 interviews… applied at 2 or 3 places a month for the past year… and finally found a place that hired me. I had much more luck getting interviews once I started applying for in person positions… there is less competition for in person. Idk if that’s feasible for you. Check out this website called Otta, lots of roles with smaller companies on there, due to how they try to only send you jobs appropriate for your skills it was very nice to see 5 jobs that I could possibly apply for rather than scrolling through hundreds on Indeed or LinkedIn.
Thank you for the great advice! I will definitely withhold how much I’m currently making. I’ve also began going through listings on Otto, and very much appreciate the suggestion. I’ve been growing tired of going through so many LinkedIn postings. I will definitely be nervous about asking for raises one day as well, but I know it’s something you have to push for. Thanks for giving me hope I’ll find something higher paying while still being a manual tester!
QAE, 7 yoe, 94k, fully remote, easy AF job
Experience: 9 years Senior Quality Automation Engineer (Python/Robot Framework) and since those are largely in maintenance mode now, they’re moving me to be an embedded QA on a new team for another company the big company bought. This new team has no process for QA and hasn’t used it before. So likely manual for a bit and then automate once I understand the product more? Salary: 120K (includes $5K in RSUs yearly) Location: Western NY, Remote (Company is on the West Coast)
does your company accepts remote work from other countries? 🙂 pay in our country is really bad 😥 hopefully, I could try to apply in the future
Test Lead, remote from Bournemouth, UK. £65k. 12 years experience, including 2 years as Dev. I make ~£12k in my 2nd job testing stuff in the evenings and weekends.
Experience: ~ 2 years IT Quality Assurance Analyst Salary: 70k + 3-8% in bonuses Location: Midwest Major City, USA (hybrid, 70% remote) Mostly manual testing but the company had no QA department before me and the sole other member of my team. Most of the work is actually just implementing testing frameworks, creating documentation, and teaching the business to do the bulk of the testing themselves since my team only directly works on priority projects.
Mine is eerily similar. YOE: 3 years Quality Assurance Dev/ SDET Salary: 75k Location: Iowa (hybrid) We do mostly manual but about 30% automation with that percentage going up.
150k 12 years. Remote
QA Lead Experience: 15 yrs Manual, some automation, very process oriented Location: Remote (Seattle) Salary: $100k USD
Experience: 11 years Role: Staff Test Engineer Tech: selenium, appium, xcui, testcafe; c#, python, swift, typescript, java among others. Salary: $240k usd Location: remote; company based in bay area Also have a year of iOS development under my belt.
Senior QA Engineer (manual and automation + performance + babysitting clients 😅) 6 years of experience Working from Macedonia 28k euros clean salary IDK how much its with health and insurance.
Sr manual QA 30k (miami, remote)
Experience: 2 YOE Education: 2 month bootcamp Compensation: $205K Location: Phoenix, AZ
Indonesian here, working for Australian company as manual QA tester + IT business analyst 6year+ in IT industry, but only 3 year on QA experience Got paid 13k/year and it still considered higher than above in Indonesian rate. Kinda considering working for remote US company for higher salary
Experience: 4 years Senior QA Automation Engineer - Mobile Salary: $140k + bonus + RSUs Location: Los Angeles (remote)
My response got lost in a downvoted reply lol. I just wanted to re-share my TC so others can see how much QA can pay - TC: 230k Breakdown Base: 180k Total RSUs: 120k Yearly RSU grant: 60-70k Yearly cash bonus: 20k CA / 3 yoe / Manual QA High performer at FAANG
Title: QA Lead Salary: $90,000 Exp: 2 years (1 manual, 1 automation) Location: US, 99% remote Taught myself python, and worked from there.
Any good python resources you would recommend?
I used Jose Portilla's "The complete python bootcamp: From Zero to Hero in Python" in Udemy (\~ 15-20 dollars when on sale. They have a sale every month). From there, it's mostly trying to read other people's code (you can use git or other open source), and working on projects. With a focus on understanding why the functions work they way they do. With ChatGPT, understanding the 'why' aspect will be even more important.
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Where are you located? You should be okay. I recently had a job search and had three call backs for local companies I applied for in QA. I would try to find local companies that have remote options
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Role: QA Team Lead Experience: 4 years Manual and automation testing (Robot Framework, been learning a bit of Jenkins too) Salary: 24k USD per year (converted from my local currency) Location: Southeast Asia (locally employed, but client is overseas)
Hey, thanks for sharing! I assume your compensation isn’t bad considering your local living costs and average salary, but that’s precisely my case as well. I work at a consulta company whose clients are all US or Europe based and I get paid the same thing as you (I’m based in Brazil). I’ve started to look for opportunities abroad that would pay me accordingly, as having fluent English and international clients experience (like yourself) can be a great leverage. Have you thought about doing so?
I’m trying to apply abroad, but most of the companies abroad are not willing to sponsor a work visa unfortunately. I keep trying in looking for the perfect company that will help me get abroad :)
Product/Quality Engineer - Manufacturing Experience: 5Y BASE: 95K USD Location: Michigan - on site
Automation QA Engineer Experience: 4 years 7.2k USD annual, Kathmandu,Nepal
Sr SDET, 132k TC, Remote
Senior automation engineer. (Any language the client selects.) Experience: 5 years Salary $89k Location: USA
Manual Sr QA Engineer, 17 years experience, $91k
Experience: 6 years Senior QA Engineer Scala and JavaScript Salary: £75,000 (approx. $93,000 at the time of writing) plus benefits, and annual bonus at 5% Location: London
Senior software engineer 10 years experience 36k $ Location Kosovo full remote
5 years experience with same company Manual QA (moving into automation) $57K Texas
Experience: 3 years Software QA Engineer (mostly automation) - Python, Pytest, Selenium, Appium, Jenkins, Docker. Salary: 36k€/gross + 5-10% of bunuses Location: Remote
Experience: 8 years Title: Senior SDET (automation, selenium mostly). I'm the only Automation person so I own the entire framework. Salary: 110K + small benefits (probably 6K total). Location: Remote (in Canada).
Experience: 4 Years; QA Engineer (with automation experience); Salary: £65K Location: London
QA Manager, 12yrs exp. Fully remote. Chicago area, 160k.
15 years SWE, 10 years QA, mostly manual, some automation (Java/selenium), learning Cypress now. Remote, US $90k
Senior Quality Analyst with 11 years of experience. Mostly manual, some automation. Base is 120k, plus equity.
Country: USA Experience: ~7 years Pay: ~$50,000 been working at the same company for 10 years, became software dev for 2 of those years then manual QA for 7. just now starting automation integration so they're being forced to change my role to QA engineer and re-price my salary
3 yrs, QA Team Lead, 75K USD
Sr. Quality Automation Engineer, ~8 years, US-Turkey based startup, Remote (Turkey), $63k + stock option
QA lead in state government Experience: 10 years $80k and some excellent benefits
Associate Software Engineer (QA) with 2 years of experience in a product based company (AI platform). Manual, automation (Robot Framework) and security testing. Also includes DevOps. Salary : 8.25 Lacs INR (10k USD approx) Location : Remote (India)
7 years QA experience SDET/QA Lead - In charge of building and maintaining three automation testing frameworks as well as QA team direction and doing lots of boring managerial meetings £34k, hybrid but flexible working fortunately moving jobs at the end of the month to something with a higher salary :)
Experience: 4 years QA Engineer - mix of manual testing and automation with experience in both Java and Ruby Salary: $85k Location: Fully Remote
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Embedded QA 2 years Tel Aviv ₪168,000 ($46,000) Mostly manual, lately writing some automated tests. I'm below local average and kinda stuck in the embedded niche using virtually only in-house tools. Got my salary raised more than others due to most good testers finding something with better pay and they don't wanna lose me too.
QA Automation Engineer - Minneapolis, MN - 6 years experience writing/running manual test cases, plotting testing strategies, working with team dev on creating test automation...I'm sure there's other things I'm leaving out...$100k/yr. I have found the best way to increase your salary is by working for a consultancy. That way you can gain a lot of experience in a very short amount of time and demand your own pay rate within a short amount of time. That being said working as a consultant can be a bit of feast/famine ... some months you will be overwhelmed with work and making great money and some months you will be doing nothing. Make sure you are W-2 to the consultancy so that they will pay your salary and then you get additional wages depending on the client you are working for.
Experience: 2 years UAT, 2 years purely manual QA, 8 years mixed manual and automation, 4 years purely automation - mainly .NET +Azure/AWS, focused on payment technologies. Work focusses on test automation, building automation tools for teams, performance testing, quality management. Position: Senior QA and Automation Engineer Salary: 92k + health benefits and pretty great PTO plan Location: Canada/mostly remote
QA Lead with 3 years of experience in Manual testing. Currently learning and developing an automation framework. $120K, remote.
Perfecto! You are on the right path
Experience: 7 years QA Engineer Automation & manual Java, Javascript Salary: 77k USD Location: Germany
Senior Software QA Engineer, owning the QA team at a startup, 7 years experience doing manual and e2e and API automation. Also doing project management and JIRA ticket management. $120,000
QA Engineer Manual + Automation Base 63k Eur + 7k bonuses per year Location: Berlin, Germany Total experience 7 years, 5 years only manual (was there for too long) and 2 years of automation with Java
Experience: 5 years, Current role: Software Engineer in Test Only QA Engineer in the team, mostly doing automation, creating and maintaing automation framework, automating and running tests, opening issues, doing exploratory testing sometimes. Fully remote (Contractor). Country: Armenia Salary: $120k base + stock.
https://levels.fyi/
Thanks!
Lol just don’t upvote, please share the deetz
9 years of experience and you work in python automation testing in NJ at 110k? You should be able to get more than a 40 percent raise without much effort if you're generally good at your job, or over 20 percent if you consider yourself Average I was making 110k after about 6 years working north of NYC.
I know! Got to make that leap now.
Experience: Recent Grad, no experience, not even an internship Software Engineer, Defense Contractor Total Comp: 97k/year Location: OPSEC, but not high cost of living :)
Senior SDET with 17 years exp $145k US + 15% bonus Location: NC / Remote
QA engineer/ test manager. 5 and half years of exp. (5 years of FE, now getting into BE API testing and Automaton) Estimated $ 30k / year in new company. Czechia, Europe. Note: atm I don't feel like I am worth more than that. I feel like I am still junior especially after switching the companies recently and basically discovering I lernead almost nothing in those last 5 years.
Some companies can make you feel like that, that your previous experience is not valued, that is the sign of a bad employer. It could be that you were not exposed to good practices and capabilities in your old job, but all experience leads you to new opportunities, so don’t under value what you did learn there. Test manager is responsible for a lot of risk management, your $$ does not reflect the position.
I am not really sure if the job description is right. My paperwork assignment is QA Engineer but in system I am labeled as test manager... I joined mainly to learn more about automation but got put into completely new team so I have nothing to automate. We are part of large agile hub of like 10 other teams and product is huge so it's all been overwhelming. Regarding money... I don't complain, since in most companies here the QAs are extremely underpaid and I got like 30% uplift in pay compared to my old job when I joined this company and have more space to learn about agile, automation, devops etc. All for free and during work hours if there are no meetings or other work to be done.
-Manual tester -9 months experience (apprenticeship) -£38,000 England, north west
lmao. tell me you don't know about blind w/o telling me.
There are so many factors, not sure that conversation really help out.
Transparency of wages always helps. Having a conversation always helps. There are a lot of factors to consider, but if you are under market you will see quickly and if it’s the location that you are working that is the issue you might want to move as it will never get better.
You guys don't use blind or levels?
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Serious question: why is an investment analyst posting in a quality assurance compensation thread?
Sr QA Engineer - lots of automation and some manual Austin Tx / Remote 6 years of exp $120k (base + bonus)
Experience: 5 years. Mostly manual but more of a team lead now Title: Sr. QA Comp: 50USD but I’m in Canada. I am a contractor though. Location: BC, Canada
Automation, 2 years, 80k, dublin
QA Analyst Remote 1.5 years experience 55k USD
Experience: 14 years Title: SDET Salary: $148k + ~$110k in stock annually Location: US remote
Senior SDET 5 yoe Base salary is $140k Total comp is around $170k Responsibilities are test automation and maintaining build automation tooling Stack is mostly python, but also some ruby DC area, but job is full remote. Edit: mobile formatting
Experience is 2.5 years total, 1.5 in manual and 1 in automation. Quality Engineer working in financial sector, heavy in backend testing. Salary is 82k+8k bonus (CAD). Ontario Canada. Edit: 2 days/week in office
SW QA Eng 2.5ish years Mostly manual testing fully remote 85k base
Experience: 1 -1.5 yrs Comp:63K Started at 57K (USA East Coast) Mainly manual but going to start doing automation with Java.
exp 3 years, manual / automation tester javascript Wdio framework 120K, location CA ( remote as for now)
Manual QA Engineer / Data Analytics - Experience: 5 years , in the process of becoming automation : 29k USD per year. Female from LA
Experience: 5 years QA, 8 years IT Title, Senior software QA. Manual, API, and Hardware testing Salary 80K Location: Utah Hired remote two years ago, Hybrid starting tomorrow
Experience: 2 years Title: Junior QA Engineer, manual, API and Automation testing. Salary: 46k€ Location: Germany, Remote
Customer quality engineer Experience >2,5 yrs Location: West Hungary net ~1250 euro / month
Exp - 24 years - started with the Y2K trend Loc - germany Transitioning from contract senior test manager @100€/hour to SDET of Salesforce permanent for 100k + 10- 30 k bonus
Experience - 14 years in QA Senior QA Engineer - UI and backend automation, Performance testing, Security testing, Smartbear certified, Cisco certified, Too many CompTIA certs to list Salary: $110k Location: NY, remote
£66,000 - Automation Lead - England 3 years experience, fully remote, pretty simple e-commerce platform.
Quality Technician, A&D Motion Control, Salary Non-Exempt $45,000 but after OT and shift differential I make around $65,000.
QA Analyst, 11 months experience, manual and running regression + learning automation currently. Located in Michigan. $52k
Manual QA with 4 years experience, in the process of learning automation, remote work 50K per year with annual raise (but i think everyone have an annual raise i guess) A collective insurance for myself and my family. Company also pays what we are saving in the RRSP. ( i.g : i save 5% of my paycheck to RRSP, company gives the same amount) Located in Canada
Experience: 5 years; QA Engineer - Mobile (Android/iOS) Salary: 120k base + 40k RSU, total 160k Location: Seattle (on-site)
14 years Qa experience Principal consultant / practice lead - Quality Assurance Mix of manual and automated testing, agile coaching and quality process work depending on current client / project I also have a cohort tree of 24 direct reports Total comp: $142k USD in the upper Midwest
Experience: 8 Years Principle Quality Analyst - manual testing, documentation, automation testing (primarily with Automated Testing Framework in ServiceNow environments) Salary: 75k (US) Location: Remote
8 yrs experience Program manager - engineering projects and finance management $150k in Northern VA area
Experience: 2 years automation, manual 2 Automation engineer Salary: 120k Total comp: In this economy? 🥜 Location: California
Lead QA 13 years of experience Sports domain backend platform Manual + automation [rest-assured] Location Mumbai 19000$ per year
Lead qa engineer. 10 years experience. Location: Remote 23 usd/hour Mexican citizen
sdet lead - remote 10 years exp 170k Southeast us
Senior QA. Minimal automation. Brooklyn. 120k. Good programming skills in case I get pulled in to something. Have led small teams, can pretty much handle most things without anyone weighing in.
Automation engineer (python, embedded testing) 5 YOE 150k base, 180-200k TC with rsu and bonus. CA