Senior quality assurance vs quality assurance specialist

The differences between senior quality assurances and quality assurance specialists can be seen in a few details. Each job has different responsibilities and duties. It typically takes 2-4 years to become both a senior quality assurance and a quality assurance specialist. Additionally, a senior quality assurance has an average salary of $98,182, which is higher than the $63,443 average annual salary of a quality assurance specialist.

The top three skills for a senior quality assurance include QA, java and test cases. The most important skills for a quality assurance specialist are GMP, patients, and FDA.

Senior quality assurance vs quality assurance specialist overview

	Senior Quality Assurance	Quality Assurance Specialist
Yearly salary	$98,182	$63,443
Hourly rate	$47.20	$30.50
Growth rate	-	6%
Number of jobs	79,947	83,505
Job satisfaction	-	-
Most common degree	Bachelor's Degree, 64%	Bachelor's Degree, 58%
Average age	44	44
Years of experience	4	4

What does a senior quality assurance do?

The senior quality assurance or QA agent is in charge of ensuring all products and services are up to the company's standards and customer expectations. The role is vital as it helps the company fine-tune its products and services, resolve issues, and satisfy customer experience. Through the quality assurance team headed by its senior leaders, a company grows, expands, and improves. A quality assurance agent needs to have an eye for detail, be highly organized, and provide insights and advice for continual improvement.

What does a quality assurance specialist do?

A quality assurance specialist is an individual who is responsible for monitoring, inspecting, and proposing measures to correct and improve a company's product. Quality assurance specialists need to outline quality assurance policies and procedures, making sure that quality standards are assured. It is important that a quality assurance specialist should have strong attention to detail and is excellent in data collection. This work may require a minimum of bachelor's degree and certification to get certified.

Senior quality assurance vs quality assurance specialist salary

Senior quality assurances and quality assurance specialists have different pay scales, as shown below.

	Senior Quality Assurance	Quality Assurance Specialist
Average salary	$98,182	$63,443
Salary range	Between $74,000 And $128,000	Between $41,000 And $97,000
Highest paying City	Redwood City, CA	San Francisco, CA
Highest paying state	California	Rhode Island
Best paying company	Twitter	Apple
Best paying industry	Retail	Pharmaceutical

Differences between senior quality assurance and quality assurance specialist education

There are a few differences between a senior quality assurance and a quality assurance specialist in terms of educational background:

	Senior Quality Assurance	Quality Assurance Specialist
Most common degree	Bachelor's Degree, 64%	Bachelor's Degree, 58%
Most common major	Computer Science	Business
Most common college	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Stanford University

Senior quality assurance vs quality assurance specialist demographics

Here are the differences between senior quality assurances' and quality assurance specialists' demographics:

	Senior Quality Assurance	Quality Assurance Specialist
Average age	44	44
Gender ratio	Male, 57.7% Female, 42.3%	Male, 42.8% Female, 57.2%
Race ratio	Black or African American, 6.2% Unknown, 4.7% Hispanic or Latino, 8.8% Asian, 12.0% White, 67.7% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.5%	Black or African American, 6.2% Unknown, 4.7% Hispanic or Latino, 8.8% Asian, 12.0% White, 67.7% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.5%
LGBT Percentage	11%	11%

Differences between senior quality assurance and quality assurance specialist duties and responsibilities

Senior quality assurance example responsibilities.

Perform inter-departmental audits documenting ISO compliant results with associate corrective action requests in order to achieve company-wide certification.
Facilitate achievement of ISO certification through implementation of complete facility calibration program using MP3 with focus on continuous improvement.
Work with the vendor and management to provide defect density metrics and goals for total SDLC defect reduction.
Involve in testing of extraction process from database using back end process and dump into data file of specific delimiter.
Work closely with the lead application developers and develop mapping, extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) technical specifications.
Utilize DB2 SPUFI and DB2 FileAid for testing purposes and ClearQuest for defect reporting and tracking

Quality assurance specialist example responsibilities.

Manage all NDT relate gauges to ensure calibrations requirements are meet.
Provide employee training and manage all NDT certification records per ASNT SNT-TC-1A.
Lead the HACCP team to ensure full compliance with regulatory and industrial food safety standards.
Manage product and environmental sampling for chemical and microbial analysis to meet HACCP requirements.
Lead cross functional project team to build user-friendly windows base customer support applications which interface with the OmniPlan/OmniPlus mainframe application.
Execute quality processes in tissue banking and medical device, FDA requirements 21 CFR 1271 and 21 CFR 820.

Senior quality assurance vs quality assurance specialist skills

Common senior quality assurance skills

QA, 9%
Java, 8%
Test Cases, 7%
Jira, 4%
Regression, 4%
API, 4%

Common quality assurance specialist skills

GMP, 6%
Patients, 5%
FDA, 5%
CAPA, 4%
Corrective Action, 4%
CFR, 4%

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Senior Quality Assurance vs Quality Assurance Specialist

Updated January 8, 2025

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