Hey Jesse! I agree 100% and was trying to convey the sense that any team can benefit from having extra help with manual QA and improving automated test coverage, and thus those are great tasks for early-career engineers.

I guess "QA engineer" doesn't mean the same time everyone, given yours and some of the other responses.

On my teams, any time there is a QA person, their job is mostly test automation, but I supposed those are technically "test automation engineers" and "QA engineers" aren't allowed to code... or something like that. I mostly work at startups where everyone has to do everything.

I think you are on the right track with letting people demonstrate understanding of the software development lifecycle by successfully completing low-risk, test automation tickets.

I usually include those in onboarding along with practice writing up tickets to capture bugs, adding code comments for documentation tickets, and small followed by larger refactoring tasks.