QA engineers own product quality across exploratory, functional and regression testing. The honest picture in 2026 is that purely manual roles have contracted and salaries in that band have stagnated, while hybrid testers who can also automate have seen demand hold up. Organisations still need people who can think like a user and find edge cases no script would generate — that skill has not been automated away. The risk is career stagnation, not disappearance, and the remedy is adding automation early.