In August of '22 I took on a new role in a new company. I became a quality engineer, supporting two teams. No one in my department had prevous experiences working with a quality engineer. And I hadn't done it before either. Most of us were also quite new to the company, which itself was quite young as well. So one of my biggest tasks in this new job was figuring out what exactly my job was. This meant having conversations, trying things out, reflecting regularly on my position and about the role of quality engineer in general. One thing I was explicitly told to do, was to facilitate risk sessions and exploratory testing sessions. After six months of being a quality engineer, I've done useful things for the two teams and have done useful things for the engineering department. Things such as reviewing pull requests, fixing some flaky tests, investigating support tickets, participating in refinement, finding bugs, building a proof-of-concept for a particular piece of test automation, and analyzing the length and character sets of people's names in our production data. While I know my colleagues appreciate these things, it's also true that I haven't done many of the risk sessions and exploratory testing sessions I was explicitly told to do. And that feels odd. The core of my experience report will be the story of my first six months as a quality engineer, what I did during that time and how I felt about it. I will also use those experiences as a lens to reflect on other testing roles I had in the past. What I've discovered is that these roles are inherently unstable and require a constant balancing act.