When you’re ready to automate your manual tests, you might naturally think you need to hire someone with a technical skill set who specializes in automating end-to-end tests. That is, you might think you need to hire a QA engineer. It’s not an unreasonable assumption. But for many startups, it’s the wrong thing to do. QA engineers are quite expensive (in more ways than one), bottleneck release processes with their complex tooling, and can present other types of business risks.