I’ve been a “QA Engineer” for 5-years but my job duties are definitely more in-line with a Senior Software Engineer in-Test. I’m the sole QA engineer across four 10-person I’ve been a “QA Engineer” for 5-years but my job duties are definitely more in-line with a Senior Software Engineer in-Test. I’m the sole QA engineer across four 10-person squads. I act as a scrum master in addition to doing all the manual testing and built our API, integration, web, and mobile automation frameworks. I’m leading the efforts of reshaping our entire feature development lifecycle and implementing agile processes while also writing frontend code and monitoring/managing our dev ops infra. Now that I’m thinking about it... idk how the hell I manage to do all this stuff without being overwhelmed 🤔 And I’ve just been informed that I’ll be now conducting interviews to hire a small team of QAE’s which I’ll be in charge of managing. As such, I was told I’m having my “performance reviewed” for a promotion that will align better to my job duties and incorporate some sort of “lead” or “manager” verbiage to reflect the coming team I’ll be leading. I’m located in Lincoln, Nebraska and work for a fully-distributed engineering team of about 40 engineers and data science folks. The company I work for is technically still in the “startup” stage though they’ve been around for roughly 3 years and have around $750mm in funding with more on the way in another funding round to come. Anyway, with all that said, I have no idea what I’m worth. Looking online, I’ve pulled together random salary estimates from all the big name salary data providers but my searches for “SDET lead” and other random “QAE Lead” type roles bring up inconsistent results or nothing at all. I’m a 28yo male with a bachelors in electrical engineering but no CS related majors. I taught myself everything and worked at an established tech company from when they were 125 employees all the way until 1500 employees roughly 5years later. I left on great terms because it got too big and I missed the startup culture. So, anyone have thoughts on what I should be expecting/asking for when it comes to the salary conversation? #qae #qaengineer #softwareengineering
80-120k for senior, 110+++ for lead
sweet, thank you for your reply!
Are you asking for Lincoln Nebraska or west coast? Senior TC goes from 200-250k+ on the west coast. Lead is more of a management role most places I’ve worked (not much coding) Another thing is the job duties associated with SDET / QA Engineer can vary widely from company to company. From basic automation frameworks to build things like Saucelabs from the ground up. The later will parallel with what a SWE role makes so you have to evaluate the level of your coding too.
Asking for Lincoln, primarily, since I’ll be living here for the foreseeable future. When I started 9mo’s ago, there was no automation of any kind. Not even UI snapshot unit testing. I’ve built all of our automation infra from the ground-up across all of our repo’s and implemented unit testing standards and reporting. We’re all JavaScript/node.js and I dabble in backend but most of my time is spent on the frontend with RN. I also manage DB’s (sql and postgres), message queues, AWS services (lambda, S3, redshift, EC, IoT), and our docker images.
Ok, I’m not familiar with Lincoln Nebraska but given the job duties you describe your pay should align with a senior SWE or Lead SWE. It’s probably easier to find metrics for those two from paysa.com or Glassdoor etc. TC is Total Compensation. Base Salary + Bonus + Stock