[gregshap]

I've seen it happen several times (my employer may be unusually prone to hiring jr devs as qa automation).

I agree that if you can hold out for a dev job, do that and save a year or two getting to the same place. If you really can't get a dev job and need the income, get a QA Automation job and start migrating early by asking to fix small bugs yourself, or work on the automation tooling.

At a smaller company, working on the build system and QA automation tooling might be more interesting and get more attention than what you would do as a jr software dev.