How to Become a Senior QA Engineer: Skills, Mindset, and What the Promotion Really Takes
For many QA professionals, the path to a Senior role seems straightforward: gain experience, learn new tools, perhaps dive into automation, and wait for the title change.
But when we spoke with Senior QAs at Softjourn, a different picture emerged. Their journeys suggest that becoming a Senior isn't defined by a certification, a framework, or even years of experience. Instead, it's marked by a gradual shift in how you think, make decisions, and approach problems.
Seniority Often Precedes the Title
For Viktoriia Lesyk, who has spent more than six years at Softjourn and worked across a wide range of projects, the process felt more like a confirmation than a sudden transformation.
"I followed a Personal Development Plan, but thanks to my day-to-day experience, I already possessed most of the required skills," she notes. "Of course, there were still specific, unfamiliar areas where I needed to dive deeper and expand my technical knowledge."
Lilia Shevaha shared a similar perspective. Although she officially became a Senior during her evaluation, she had already been taking on increasingly complex tasks in her daily work.
"The project itself is very demanding, and sometimes you end up learning and handling more complex things while still holding the Middle title."
This reality highlights a common truth in the tech industry: titles often lag behind actual capabilities. By the time the official promotion occurs, the professional growth has already taken place.
Don’t Avoid Complex Projects
Career growth rarely happens when you're operating entirely within your comfort zone. More often, it comes from projects that initially feel slightly overwhelming.
For Lilia, that catalyst was joining a highly complex project just one year into her testing career. The architecture featured multiple microservices and a massive testing scope spanning UI/UX, APIs, and mobile platforms.
“It took several months to understand and feel fully confident with the system,” Lilia shares. “But that challenge ultimately became one of the most important drivers of my professional development.”
Exposure to diverse domains rapidly accelerates this learning curve. Throughout her career, Viktoriia worked on fintech products, ticketing platforms, education projects, mobile applications, web solutions, and automation initiatives.
"Each new project introduced unfamiliar concepts, technologies, and business requirements," she adds. "When you're constantly exposed to new challenges, you naturally begin researching, exploring, and building expertise in areas you may never have encountered otherwise."
This continuous growth eventually sparks a fundamental shift in perspective. Viktoriia views this as gaining a "helicopter view" — the ability to step back and see the whole picture at once: the connections between components, the impact of different changes, the underlying processes, and how the various parts of an application relate to each other.
The Weight of Responsibility
A broad perspective is only valuable if backed by ownership. Both engineers emphasize that seniority brings a sharp increase in accountability.
"The more senior you become, the more decisions you're expected to make, often quickly, and you're accountable for those decisions," Viktoriia explains.
Earlier in a career, responsibility is often shared. There are leads, managers, and more experienced colleagues who help guide decisions and absorb some of the risk. Over time, the expectation shifts from being guided to providing guidance.
Lilia noticed a similar shift after her promotion: "What really changed for me after the review was the sense of even greater responsibility."
Continuous Learning
For QAs, as for many IT professionals, standing still is rarely an option. Throughout her career, Viktoriia has actively expanded her skill set through Agile courses, Jira administration training, Python automation courses, and self-directed learning.
But she emphasizes that some of the most valuable learning happens directly on projects. Thus, she mentions that flexibility and openness to change are essential qualities.
"We regularly build new integrations and work with unfamiliar architectural concepts," Viktoriia says. "As a result, you dive into research, absorb everything related to the topic, and naturally become an expert. Flexibility and a willingness to embrace change are essential."
Role of Support Systems in Career Growth
While personal initiative matters, supportive team guidance, a clear development plan, and access to diverse learning materials can significantly reduce overwhelm and make the journey much more structured and rewarding. Softjourn’s dedicated Learning and Development (L&D) function is designed specifically to help engineers map out these growth paths.
For Lilia, support from her colleagues was an important factor in her promotion. The defining factor was their supportive approach.
"My Project Manager and L&D manager were a strong driving force behind getting my review completed. What I appreciated most was that it never felt like pressure, but rather encouragement and motivation. That support was definitely one of the key factors that helped me move forward, and I’m very grateful for it."
Strong teams matter just as much, and there is a lot of knowledge you can gain simply by working side by side with them.
Early in her career, Viktoriia was inspired by a team with effective collaboration, well-organized processes, and a very positive atmosphere.
That specific experience motivated her to study Agile methodologies and Jira administration so she could recreate that environment on future projects. She also leveraged the company’s educational benefits, completing several specialized Udemy courses to round out her skill set.
Practical Advice for Aspiring QAs
Both career journeys point toward several actionable lessons:
- Develop a broader perspective: Look beyond individual tasks. Learn how your product, users, stakeholders, and third-party integrations connect.
- Practice proactivity and ownership: Learn how to find the right tools or people who can help move a task forward, proactively flag risks, and propose concrete solutions.
- Embrace challenging projects: Seek out intricate, multi-layered projects. Complex environments accelerate technical maturity far faster than comfortable, repetitive ones.
- Stay adaptable: Technology will continue to evolve. Your ability to learn and adapt will remain one of your greatest professional assets.
QA Managers’ Take on Seniority and AI
According to Ilona Sheveliova (our QA Manager), Senior QA Engineers are expected to combine strong technical expertise with the ability to validate new features and product changes quickly. On top of that, they should handle the planning to spread the QA team’s work and create testing solutions in general (planning, estimation, QA team work, and validation).
When it comes to AI, Ilona considers the ability to work with AI agents for analyzing feature requirements for coverage and corner cases an essential skill for Senior QA Engineers. AI is also a powerful tool for generating highly realistic test data and a range of negative test scenarios. Most importantly, a Senior QA should know how to work with AI agents right inside the IDE environment. This keeps the AI in full project context, making it much easier to investigate and find the root causes of floating issues that are hard to reproduce or localize. This will speed up the bug-fixing process.
Conclusion
The clearest takeaway from these conversations is that Seniority isn’t simply a destination reached by checking boxes on a technical spreadsheet.
It's the ability to see the bigger picture, make decisions confidently, take ownership of outcomes, and continue learning. Or, as Viktoriia puts it, it's developing the "helicopter view" that allows you to understand not only what's happening in front of you, but how every piece fits into the larger system.
The promotion formalizes the milestone, but this mindset shift is what gets you there.
