Engineering
QA Engineer CV: what employers ask for
QA roles have moved towards automation and quality ownership across the team. Screeners want to see test suites you built, how they fit into delivery and what quality improved. A CV that only describes manual test cases now looks narrow for most postings.
From real postings
We read 33 QA Engineer job postings from 18 companies on 6 November 2026. The most named asks were Automated testing (26), Python (21) and Test plans and cases (20). 17 postings stated years of experience; the middle value was 4.
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What a strong QA Engineer CV looks like
Start here if you are editing a CV today. The evidence for each point follows below.
Section order, top to bottom
- HeaderName, email, phone, city, and a link to a test suite you wrote, if you can share one.
- SummaryTwo or three lines: your title, years of experience, manual or automation focus, and your tools.
- ExperienceMost recent first. Bullets about what your testing caught or sped up, with the framework named inside.
- SkillsGrouped: languages, test frameworks (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium), API testing, CI, bug tracking.
- CertificationsISTQB or similar, if the posting names it.
- EducationDegree and year, kept short.
The summary
Say whether you automate, and in what. Automated testing was the most named ask in our sample, ahead of any single framework.
QA engineer with four years of experience in test automation. I write Playwright and API tests in TypeScript and Python, and run them in CI on every pull request.
Skills: show them, do not just list them
Automated testing, Python and test planning each came up in more than half the postings we read. CI/CD was common too. Show your tests running in a pipeline and what they caught.
Weak and strong bullets
Illustrative rewrites, not real candidates. Use your own work, and only numbers you can back up.
Weak: Wrote automated tests.
Stronger: Built a Playwright suite of 180 end-to-end tests that runs on every pull request in about 8 minutes.
Why it works: Framework, size and speed of a suite that runs on every change.
Weak: Performed regression testing.
Stronger: Replaced a two-day manual regression pass with automated API and UI tests, letting the team release weekly instead of monthly.
Why it works: Automation tied to how often the team can release.
Weak: Reported bugs.
Stronger: Introduced a bug template with reproduction steps and logs, which reduced back-and-forth on tickets and sped up fixes.
Why it works: A process change with a clear effect on the team's work.
What QA Engineer job postings ask for
Counted from 33 real postings, not guessed. When you paste a posting into Resymetry, it checks each of these asks against your CV and marks it as shown, only listed, or missing.
| Skill or ask | Postings naming it | Only as nice to have |
|---|---|---|
| Automated testing | 26 of 33 | – |
| Python | 21 of 33 | 2 |
| Test plans and cases | 20 of 33 | – |
| CI/CD | 16 of 33 | – |
| Cross-functional work | 10 of 33 | – |
| Metrics / KPIs | 10 of 33 | – |
| Kubernetes | 8 of 33 | 1 |
| Risk management | 8 of 33 | – |
| Selenium / Cypress / Playwright | 8 of 33 | 2 |
| API testing | 7 of 33 | 2 |
Show 8 more
| Skill or ask | Postings naming it | Only as nice to have |
|---|---|---|
| Jira | 7 of 33 | – |
| Docker | 6 of 33 | – |
| Java | 6 of 33 | – |
| Data pipelines | 5 of 33 | – |
| GCP | 5 of 33 | 1 |
| LLMs / generative AI | 5 of 33 | 1 |
| Machine learning | 5 of 33 | – |
| Prioritisation | 5 of 33 | – |
This is a small sample, so read it as a direction rather than a measurement. QA, SDET and test automation titles are included; hardware quality and test roles are not.
How we counted
On 6 November 2026 we read 33 live QA Engineer postings from 18 companies, through their public job boards (Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby). A posting counted when its title matched the role. We took at most three per company, so no single employer sets the result.
A skill counts once per posting, when it is named outside the benefits and company boilerplate. Matching is by keyword, so read the numbers as “named in”, not “strictly required”. “Only as nice to have” means it appeared only under a heading such as “Nice to have” or “Bonus”. 20 of the 33 postings had such a heading, so that column is a floor.
By location on the posting: 17 US, 2 UK, 6 India, 8 elsewhere or remote. Most employers in the sample are technology companies, which skews the result towards their stacks.
Companies sampled: Anduril, Bloomreach, Coinbase, Coursera, Druva, Duolingo, Epic Games, Fivetran, Graphcore, HackerRank, Lucid Motors, Okta, Perplexity, Relativity, Riot Games, SpaceX, Stripe, Zscaler.
The script that produced these numbers is scripts/role-postings.mjs in the Resymetry repository. It stores counts only, never the text of a posting.
What employers look for in a QA Engineer CV
Screeners check these first. Each one should be visible in your job entries, not only in a skills list.
- Test automation in a named framework, such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or API testing tools.
- Tests integrated into CI so they run on every change.
- A clear test strategy: what to automate, what to test manually and why.
- Finding and reporting bugs clearly, and helping prevent them earlier.
- Working inside a delivery team rather than as a separate gate at the end.
4 common QA Engineer CV mistakes and how to fix them
Counting test cases written.
Fix: Say what the tests protected and what changed, such as fewer escaped bugs or faster releases.
Automation mentioned without a framework or language.
Fix: Name both, and say how the suite runs.
No link to delivery.
Fix: Show how your work affected release speed or confidence.
Only manual testing described for an automation role.
Fix: Add any automation you have done, even small, and describe it concretely.
Starting from scratch, or the layout is the problem rather than the content? There are free ATS CV templates to start from.
Know your chances for QA Engineer roles
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QA Engineer CV questions
- Should a QA CV focus on manual or automated testing?
- Most postings now expect automation. Lead with it if you have it, and show manual testing through strategy and exploratory work.
- Which QA tools should I list?
- The ones you used at work and the ones the posting names. Show the main framework inside a job entry, not only in a list.
- How do I measure QA impact on a CV?
- Use real figures such as suite run time, release frequency, escaped bugs or time saved on regression.