Hi Amy! That's great you work on a team large enough to hire test automation engineers better than production engineers!

In the one company I worked at that hired test automation engineers and also had full-time QA engineers, you wouldn't want either of them writing production code.

In my startup experiences where a handful of engineers do everything, I use manual QA and writing automated tests as onboarding tasks because new hires can quickly complete those tasks accurately, whereas they rarely are doing well writing production code during their first 90 days.

Thanks for sharing the view from well-staffed teams, though, Amy!