In my last role, the company had advertised the job as āQA Software Testerā. When it came to contract creation time for the role, the wonderful person who hired me met me for coffee to talk through the contract and ask me was I happy with everything I saw. I pointed out that Iād like to adjust the job title somewhat now that I had a better understanding of the role Iād be filling and suggested āTest and Automation Engineerā which they were super happy to do 
Do you have QA in your job title? If you do, what does the QA stand for? e.g. Quality Assurance, Quality Advocate or something else?
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At the workplace I use the shorter, Software Test Engineer.
Although I would prefer to be testing the hardware any day
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Right now I title myself as āTesterā as that is the simplest way I know. A little story about QA as a title. I had different Tester titles for 10 years and then I joined an agile organisation that was pioneers in the country. So they wanted to distinguish between testers in that organization and the traditional testers so there we all had the title āQA Engineerā as in Quality Assurance.
Some years later when I was a āTesterā again I had a discussion with a colleague that actually had had the Quality Assurance title from the ISO 9000 auditing. And in his mind QA had nothing to do with testing since it was mainly reviewing documents and seeing that the organization were following the processes. So now I am happy to stay away from the title āQAā
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I have a historical context reason for feeling ill towards Quality Assurance in my job title.
In my years in the games industry, there was a clear distinction between those who tested at the end (QA) who were also seen as bottom of the rung, and then those who worked as part of development proper, were called test engineers.
I think my main problem isnāt with Quality being in a job title though, it is the assurance partā¦I donāt mind just tester, but if we are a part of a team called engineers, perhaps that also doesnāt help?
So in conclusion, I donāt like QA went the A is assurance. When the A is advocate, thatās fine, but probably doesnāt describe what you do either.
Oh I donāt know, I have a headache now.
Letās all be called Test Ninjas or something
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Around here, QA and software testing DO mean two different things.
So if we talk about QA, you mean Quality Engineer, which means you are testing the quality of some physical product.
If we talk about software test engineer, you mean tester.
So if ask for a QA job, you will probably not be testing software.
However, you still need to explain the difference quite often, as itās an unwritten distinction, and not everyone has gotten the memo.
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Lol. Test ninjas would be awesome!
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I have a QA in my job title (QA Specialist) and to be honest havenāt thought about it too much, Iām pretty content. The only downside is that the average layperson has no idea what QA means so in daily life I use terms like āsoftware testerā. Honestly Iād prefer if more people translated their titles so something others can understandā¦
Personally, and it may be a language and culture thing, I always find āengineeringā odd when seen in developer/tester titles, as I associate engineering with people who design and build bridges or buildings or telecom networks. And in my home country the term (engineering) is not used in the uni degree names for computer science programs. But by now Iāve learned itās probably someone pretty technical, like in testing maybe they do automation testing or such. For myself Iād not want that title as I find it so unfamiliar.
As someone suggested, Testing Ninja sounds pretty awesomeā¦ 
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I āadvertiseā myself as CIO (Chief Investigation Officer) as well as Science Advocate on conference badges, an online profile and similar occasions.
In the context of most projects I work for itās āsoftware testerā almost exclusively.
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When I came into this business, I joined the Quality Assurance team because our focus was on data quality, challenging data collection methodologies and talking to external consultants about the robustness of those methodologies. Only once that was sufficiently settled to the satisfaction of senior executives did we turn our attention to our internal data handling and the tools we used to collect, store and manipulate data. It was probably anything up to two years after I joined the QA Team that I first looked at a piece of software to determine whether it was functioning in a way that meant it delivered results that were ārightā and that the organisation could have confidence in.
Iād go for āTest Ninjaā as well, though I suspect my ninjitsu days are probably past me! Iād like to think I could achieve the level of āTest Senseiāā¦
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That might be one of the most horrible titles I have ever seen. I hope you find a way to get away from it.