ICT Quality Assurance Engineer
An ICT Quality Assurance Engineer designs and executes comprehensive testing strategies for software applications and systems in Australian organisations. They develop test plans, execute manual and automated tests, document defects, and verify that software meets functional, performance, and security requirements before release to production environments.
What this job is
An ICT Quality Assurance Engineer designs and executes comprehensive testing strategies for software applications and systems in Australian organisations. They develop test plans, execute manual and automated tests, document defects, and verify that software meets functional, performance, and security requirements before release to production environments.
Are employers advertising this role?
Falling, down 63.0% over 5 years
Counted across a group of similar roles. These are three-month rolling averages of online job advertisements, not filled positions.
Source: Jobs and Skills Australia, Internet Vacancy Index.
Day-to-day
Design and develop test strategies and test plans aligned with project scope, requirements, and risk assessments. Develop and maintain automated test scripts using tools such as Selenium, Cypress, or UFT to improve testing efficiency. Execute manual functional testing against documented requirements and acceptance criteria. Perform regression testing to verify that code changes do not introduce new defects into existing functionality. Conduct performance and load testing using tools such as JMeter or LoadRunner to validate system behaviour under peak usage. Execute security testing and vulnerability assessments in accordance with OWASP standards and Australian Signals Directorate guidelines. Document and log defects in defect tracking systems such as Jira or Azure DevOps with clear reproduction steps and severity classifications. Verify defect fixes and conduct retesting to confirm that issues are resolved without introducing regressions.
Who does this now
About 1,700 people worked in this occupation across Australia at the 2021 Census.
What this role asks for
Bachelor degree or higher (ABS skill level 1)
Can employers fill these jobs
Employers hiring for this occupation were generally able to find suitable applicants in 2025. This measures how hard employers found it to fill jobs. It is not a count of jobs, and it does not say whether the occupation is growing.
Requirements
The standard entry pathway requires a bachelor degree or higher (ABS Skill Level 1). Specific qualification requirements vary by employer and state. Some employers may accept equivalent experience. Check yourcareer.gov.au for available courses and dewr.gov.au/skills-reform/free-tafe for subsidised training options.
The honest hard part
The work can feel repetitive: running the same test scripts over and over, chasing bugs someone else created. Automation skills are crucial to stay relevant, so you need constant upskilling or risk being pushed toward manual testing only, which pays less and feels like a dead end.
Where the jobs are
Financial services, insurance, and government IT are the biggest employers. Most roles are on-site or hybrid rather than fully remote, especially when starting out. Regional Australia has far fewer opportunities unless you're willing to work for state government or large corporates with offices there.
Pay
Published for ANZSCO unit group 2632, the wider group this job sits in, not for this job on its own.
This is the median for full-time employees who are not managers and are paid at the adult rate, before tax and salary sacrifice. It is a guide to what the work pays, not a wage rate.
Source: ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025, customised report.
Skills
- Attention to Detailcore
- Develop automated software testscore
- Develop ICT test suitecore
- Execute software testscore
- Incident Reportingcore
- Levels of software testingcore
- Problem Solvingcore
- Process Documentationcore
- Process Improvement Identificationcore
- Provide software testing documentationcore
- Quality Assurance and Checkingcore
- Quality Assurance Monitoringcore
- Report Writingcore
- Risk Identificationcore
- SLA and KPI Adherencecore
- Stakeholder Communicationcore
- Team Collaborationcore
- Written Communicationcore
- Address problems critically
- Agile project management
- Continuous Learning and Upskilling
- Feedback Collection and Actioning
- ICT debugging tools
- ICT project management methodologies
- Lean project management
- Manage schedule of tasks
- Microsoft Excel Data Management
- Policy and Procedure Adherence
- Power BI Reporting and Dashboards
- Process-based management
- Regulatory and Legislative Awareness
- Reporting and Analytics
- ServiceNow IT Service Management
- Time Management and Prioritisation
- Verbal Communication
Which of these do you have?
Tick the ones you haveCommon questions
Sources
- ABS OSCA 2024, occupation definition and task statements
- ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025, customised report.
- ABS, 2021 Census of Population and Housing based on usual place of residence (Custom Report). OSCA Experimental Estimates.
Role data is drawn from official Australian Government sources, and each figure names where it comes from. Where a role is not in the ABS classification, the page shows no government figures for it. Data may not reflect every local variation.
What ICT Quality Assurance Engineer workers move into, from ten years of tax records.
Last updated: 30 October 2026
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