Career profile · SOC 15-1253

Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers

Develop and execute software tests to identify software problems and their causes. Design test plans, scenarios, scripts, and procedures.

Median salary
$102,610
per year
Growth outlook
Faster Than Average
BLS 10-yr
Education
Bachelor's degree
AI exposure
8.3/10
automation risk

Salary distribution (US)

Real salary data from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The p10–p90 spread tells you more than the median alone.

Bottom 10%
$56,200
25th %ile
$75,300
Median
$102,610
75th %ile
$131,300
Top 10%
$162,100

Top skills

Critical Thinking Reading Comprehension Active Learning Complex Problem Solving Quality Control Analysis Systems Analysis Judgment and Decision Making Active Listening Writing Speaking

Knowledge you'll build

  • Computers and Electronics
  • English Language
  • Mathematics
  • Engineering and Technology
  • Customer and Personal Service
  • Design
  • Administration and Management
  • Education and Training

A day in the life

You start your morning triaging the automated test suite results from the overnight CI build, flagging new failures and distinguishing real bugs from flaky tests. Your day is a blend of writing and maintaining test cases, executing manual exploratory tests on new features, and collaborating with developers in bug-triage meetings where you walk through reproduction steps and severity assessments. You work in tools like Selenium, Cypress, JIRA, and TestRail, balancing test-plan coverage with the reality that releases move fast and you cannot test everything. The satisfaction comes from catching a critical bug before it ships to production and saves the company a potential outage, but the challenge is that QA often feels like the last line of defense under the tightest deadlines.

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