So a bit of a disclaimer. I know I'm in a pretty fortunate position, but interested to hear other peoples thoughts on this.

I've been working in QE for almost 9 years now. (4 years manual / 4.5 years automation). The company treat me great, the work life balance is perfect, and I have a lot of influence, working on some super interesting projects that have a great impact.

I've been working at my current company for 4.5 years as a test automation engineer. Originally as a junior, and over the years, have worked my way up to Senior.

Despite everything, I have a bit of internal conflict, and can't help but think staying at this company could be detrimental to my career. Typically, I know it's time to leave when I'm no longer picking up new skills, however this still hasn't happened yet.

I've been casually looking for new roles, mainly because I'd quite like to work for a company in a different industry and just have a change of routine. The risk of course, is that the grass isn't always greener.

With QE being quite a niche role anyway, I've found the number of suitable roles shrinks dramatically when desired compensation, technologies used, and company fit are taken into account. I found myself these days mainly focussing less on the test side, and more on developer experience / tooling / CI, and it's something I, and my dev team really appreciate.

I know I'm in a good place with my experience, and my expertise, but can't help but feel perhaps I should change role entirely to something to broaden my options?

I have a fairly decent amount of knowledge in front-end, but could also see my myself getting more into the dev ops / platform engineering side?

The problem of course, is that I've obtained a decent amount of knowledge within QE, so it's generally pretty easy for me to find a new role should the right one pop-up. I'm just at a cross-roads, and not sure if I see myself doing QE forever. My goal was to get to Senior, and I haven't really thought about where I want to be in the next 5-10 years.

Interested to hear if anyone has switched or has similar feelings!