I've always argued that a QA engineer's job is to augment the skill set of the feature engineers to help them in writing good tests and automation suites that e

I've always argued that a QA engineer's job is to augment the skill set of the feature engineers to help them in writing good tests and automation suites that ensure the user requirements are actually met, as well as to build and maintain the CI server, QA and staging environments, and so on. Basically QA as a support for the engineers, not in contrast/conflict with engineers. Note that I said "QA engineer" there; manual QA is a different role entirely that should occur outside of engineering frameworks, whose goal is to really evaluate UX and who really answers to and works with product and design teams, not engineering. /2c