Automation Engineer
An Automation Engineer designs, builds, and maintains automated test suites and the frameworks underneath them — writing test scripts, integrating tests into CI/CD, and keeping suites fast and reliable rather than flaky. The role is code-heavy but more narrowly scoped than an SDET's broader system-building remit.
Where a manual tester primarily executes test cases by hand, an automation engineer's core deliverable is the automation itself — a Playwright or Selenium suite, a CI-integrated regression pack, a well-organized Page Object Model library other engineers can build on top of.
The title overlaps significantly with SDET at many companies, sometimes used interchangeably; where a distinction exists, "automation engineer" tends to describe a role more narrowly focused on writing and maintaining test automation specifically, while SDET often implies broader software-engineering responsibility, including test tooling and infrastructure beyond just the test scripts themselves.
