QA Engineer CV Example: Testing & Automation

Your profile should be three or four lines. Name your level, the systems you know, and the way your work helps a team. For example, you might write that you are a QA engineer with six years of web and service testing experience, strong regression planning, careful issue notes, and practical automation support.

Avoid a profile that says you are hard working, keen, and detail focused with no proof. Those claims are common and weak. A better profile shows the kind of risk you reduce. Mention fewer escaped issues, clearer release notes, faster retesting, stronger coverage, or better evidence for product owners.

For a junior QA engineer CV, keep the profile honest. You can mention training, project work, support experience, test case design, issue reports, and a careful approach to requirements. Do not claim full test strategy if you have not owned it. Show that you can learn fast and record evidence well.

For a senior QA engineer CV, the profile should show more than execution. Mention test approach, mentoring, coverage gaps, release risk, team standards, or quality improvement. Senior readers expect influence, not only completed checks.

QA roles vary. Some employers need a manual tester who is strong on exploratory work and communication. Some need a test automation engineer. Some need a quality engineer who can sit close to code and delivery practice. Read the advert before you edit the CV.

Mark the words the advert repeats. Look for regression, automation, exploratory testing, mobile, web, service checks, accessibility, release, risk, agile, Jira, test plans, issue triage, and user acceptance testing. Put the most relevant words in your profile, skills, and first recent role.

This is not keyword stuffing. It is signposting. A busy recruiter should not have to search page two to find the one skill the advert asks for. If the role wants automation, place that evidence early. If the role wants manual testing, show how you explore risk and write clear notes.

A QA Engineer UK CV should use the language employers expect in the UK. Use CV rather than resume, keep the layout simple, avoid unnecessary personal details, and make your town or region clear only where it helps the application.

QA work can sound flat when every bullet starts with tested, checked, created, or raised. Build stronger bullets with three parts: the area you covered, the action you took, and the result the team gained.

A weak bullet says you created regression tests. A stronger bullet says you planned regression checks for customer account and billing journeys before each release, helping the team focus effort on high risk changes. It is still plain English, but it shows scope and value.

Use numbers when they are real. You might mention number of releases supported, size of regression pack, reduced repeat checks, fewer reopened issues, faster triage, more stable smoke checks, or clearer release notes. Do not invent figures. Careful non-numeric wording is better than fake precision.

Useful outcomes include clearer decisions, faster investigation, stronger coverage, fewer late surprises, less repeated checking, and better release handovers. These outcomes show why your work mattered beyond completing a test list.

Manual testing is not a weakness. It can show judgement, product sense, and user empathy. Automation is useful when a check is stable, repeatable, and worth keeping. Your CV should show that you know when each approach helps.

If you built or maintained automated checks, explain what they protected. Say which journeys, features, or risks were covered. If you mainly use manual testing, explain how you plan exploratory sessions, find edge cases, confirm fixes, and record evidence. If you are learning automation, show a small project or course without overstating it.

The best QA CVs show balance. They do not treat tools as the whole role. They show test design, risk thinking, user flow knowledge, and team communication. A hiring manager should see that you can choose a useful approach rather than simply run a tool.

Issue reporting is a core QA skill, so make it visible. Do not stop at saying you logged issues in Jira. Show that your reports helped people act.

Useful evidence includes clear steps, expected and actual results, screen evidence, environment notes, severity, user impact, workarounds, linked stories, and retest status. You do not need all of that in every bullet, but your CV should show that your notes reduce back and forth.

You can also mention triage. If you helped split duplicates, confirm severity, retest fixes, update release notes, or explain risk to support teams, include it. Those tasks prove calm communication under pressure. They also show that you understand how quality work affects product, support, engineering, and release decisions.

QA engineers often add value before a feature is ready for final testing. Show where you help across the delivery cycle.

Before build work, you might review user stories, ask about edge cases, flag unclear rules, and check test data needs. During build work, you might test early versions, pair with developers, update checks, and keep notes clear. Before release, you might run regression packs, retest fixes, and share open risks.

Do not only write worked in agile teams. That phrase is too broad. Write what you did in the team. A line about reviewing acceptance criteria and finding missing error states is stronger than a line about attending ceremonies.

If you have domain experience, use it. Finance, ecommerce, healthcare, education, public sector, internal systems, and SaaS products all carry different risks. Naming the context helps the reader understand your judgement.

Use reverse chronological order. For each role, include job title, employer, dates, and location if useful. Under recent roles, use four to six bullets. Older roles can use fewer bullets unless they hold strong QA evidence.

Start the most recent role with a scope line. For example, say you owned QA for customer account, billing, and admin journeys on a SaaS product. Then use the bullets to show planning, issue quality, release support, tools, and outcomes.

Use active verbs that fit QA work: planned, reviewed, tested, reproduced, validated, automated, improved, prioritised, retested, analysed, documented, paired, and supported. Avoid inflated language that makes routine tasks sound larger than they were.

If you have both QA and non-QA experience, connect the older work to transferable evidence. Support roles can show investigation and user empathy. Business analysis can show requirements and acceptance criteria. Development work can show code review, debugging, and CI awareness.

A project section can help if your role history does not show enough technical testing, automation, or release work. Keep it short. Name the problem, your action, and the result.

For example, a small automation project could explain that repeated smoke checks were taking too long before release. You moved stable checks into a maintained suite, kept test data clear, and helped developers see broken core flows earlier. That is useful because it shows why the work mattered.

For a junior candidate, a project might be a tested demo app, an issue report portfolio, a service check collection, or a course project. Make the limits clear. Employers respect honest scope more than inflated claims.

Many QA roles do not need a degree, but education can still support your case. Software engineering, computer science, information systems, data, maths, science, or business analysis can all be relevant when paired with practical testing proof.

ISTQB can help, especially for junior roles, structured test analyst roles, and employers that name it in the advert. Put it in a certificates section. Do not rely on it alone. A certificate supports your CV; it does not replace examples from real work.

Short courses can also help. Include them when they relate to test design, agile testing, automation, accessibility, service checks, data, or delivery tools. Leave out old or thin courses that do not support the target role.

Use clear headings such as Profile, Key Skills, Work Experience, Projects, Education, Certificates, and Additional Information. Use plain bullet points. Keep dates in one format. Keep the font readable.

One page can work for a junior QA engineer. Two pages are fine for experienced QA engineers when the second page contains useful evidence. Do not reduce readability just to fit everything onto one page.

Save the file with a sensible name, such as your-name-qa-engineer-cv.pdf. Check links before sending. If the employer asks for a document format, follow the instruction.

For a mid-level profile, you could write: QA engineer with six years of experience supporting web and service releases across customer account, billing, and admin journeys. Strong in exploratory testing, regression planning, Playwright checks, Jira triage, and release readiness, with a track record of making issue evidence and quality risk easier for product and engineering teams to act on.

For a junior profile, you could write: Junior QA engineer with practical training in test case design, exploratory testing, service checks, issue reporting, and web automation basics. Brings support experience, careful reproduction notes, and a structured approach to requirements, test data, and user impact.

For a senior profile, you could write: Senior QA engineer with experience shaping test approach, improving regression coverage, mentoring junior testers, and supporting release decisions across agile product teams. Strong at connecting quality risk, defect trends, team standards, and stakeholder communication.

Useful work bullets include:

• Planned checks for customer account and billing journeys before release, helping the team focus effort on high risk changes.
• Improved Jira issue notes with clear steps, evidence, severity, and user impact.
• Built a small set of repeat checks for stable journeys and kept results visible to developers.
• Reviewed acceptance criteria during refinement and found missing error states before build work started.
• Retested fixes and kept product owners aware of what was still open before launch.
• Used service checks to validate responses, authentication behaviour, error handling, and data consistency.
• Compared recurring issues after release and suggested extra checks for areas that kept failing.
• Mentored a junior tester on clear notes, severity, reproduction steps, and practical evidence.