5 Testing Career Moves That Actually Got Me Promoted in 2026

I've been in QA engineering for over 20 years. I've watched hundreds of testers come up through the ranks — some accelerating fast, others staying at the same level for a decade wondering why.

The difference is rarely technical skill alone. Most senior engineers I know can write a Playwright test or configure a CI pipeline. What separates the ones who get promoted, who get asked to lead, who build things that matter — it's something else entirely.

Here are the five moves that actually changed my trajectory. Not the stuff you read in LinkedIn posts. The real ones.

1. I Stopped Waiting to Be Invited to the Architecture Conversation

For most of my early career, I operated under an implicit assumption: QA gets looped in after design decisions are made. My job was to test what engineering built.

That assumption cost me years.

The engineers who move up are the ones who show up to design reviews before a line of code is written. They ask questions like: "How will we know this feature is working correctly in production?" and "What's the observability story here?" These aren't QA questions — they're engineering questions. And when you start asking them, people stop thinking of you as a tester and start thinking of you as an engineer.

At Motorola Solutions, I started inserting myself into architecture reviews. Not to gatekeep or slow things down, but to ask the questions that saved rework downstream. Within six months, I was being proactively included. That visibility matters when promotion decisions get made.

2. I Built a Skill That Nobody Else Had — Then Made It Visible

In 2024, I invested heavily in AI-driven test generation. While most of my peers were still writing manual test scripts, I was building LLM-powered agents that could analyze code changes and auto-generate Playwright tests for new coverage areas.

The investment paid off, but the invisible part almost killed it. I was doing technically impressive work that nobody knew about.

The lesson: capability without visibility is a hobby. I started giving internal lightning talks. I wrote documentation. I demoed the tool in sprint reviews. I put it on my performance review artifacts.

Suneet Malhotra AI testing reputation didn't come from writing the code — it came from making sure the right people understood what the code did.

If you're doing interesting work in AI testing automation, QA agents, or self-healing test infrastructure, don't keep it to yourself. Write a blog post. Give a talk. Open-source something. The engineers who advance are the ones who teach.

3. I Started Measuring Quality in Business Terms, Not Test Terms

"We increased test coverage by 30%" is a QA metric. "We reduced customer-reported defects by 40% and cut hotfix deployments by 70%" is a business metric.

For years I reported in the first language. My managers nodded politely. Nobody's career accelerated off test coverage numbers.

The shift happened when I started asking: what does my work actually prevent? What does it enable? I mapped quality outcomes to engineering velocity, production incidents, and customer satisfaction scores. I learned to find the data that made the business case for quality investment.

This reframe changed how I was perceived. QA wasn't a cost center anymore — it was a risk management function with measurable ROI. That framing gets you in front of directors. It gets your headcount requests approved. It gets you promoted.

4. I Learned to Sponsor Other People

This one surprised me. Early in my career I thought career advancement was about what I personally accomplished. That's true up to a point — maybe senior engineer.

To get to manager and beyond, you need to demonstrate something different: that you can develop other people. Not just mentor them (give advice) but sponsor them (advocate for their opportunities, delegate meaningful work, put your reputation behind theirs).

I started doing this intentionally around 2022. I identified junior engineers on my team who were underestimated and actively created visibility for their work. I gave them the hard, high-profile assignments. I named them in my leadership updates.

Two things happened: they grew faster, and I grew faster. When you help other people succeed, the people above you notice. It signals readiness to lead at scale.

5. I Embraced the Discomfort of Being the Dumbest Person in the Room

The biggest career unlock for me was learning to seek out conversations where I was outmatched.

I started spending time with data engineers, ML practitioners, backend architects, and product leaders. I asked questions that felt embarrassingly basic. I sat through meetings where I barely understood what was being discussed.

Over time, I absorbed context that fundamentally changed my technical judgment. I started seeing QA differently — not as a quality gate at the end of development, but as a distributed responsibility embedded across the entire engineering system.

That systems-level thinking is what gets you to staff engineer and beyond. You can't think at that level if you only talk to people who think like you.

The Through-Line

Looking back, every one of these moves has a common thread: they required me to expand my identity beyond "tester."

QA engineering in 2026 is a systems discipline. It touches architecture, observability, developer tooling, AI automation, and organizational culture. The engineers who are leading in this space aren't waiting for permission to expand their scope — they're building the future of quality engineering and bringing others along.

If you're in testing and you're feeling stuck, pick one of these moves and start this week. Not next quarter. This week.

The career you want is on the other side of the discomfort you're currently avoiding.

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Suneet Malhotra is a Sr. Manager of Test Engineering at Motorola Solutions with 20+ years of experience in AI-driven QA automation. Find him at suneetmalhotra.com.