[ajeet_dhaliwal]

I think there's a change occurring recently (last 3-4 years), especially in the larger tech companies with respect to this role. There are still programmers dedicated to writing and maintaining the automation infrastructure but most of the test are expected to be written by feature developers.

Understanding the build system and devops in general is important because if the teams you work with use continuous integration then the test systems interfaces with it.

I work on a team dedicated to making build and automated test reporting better (see my profile) so obviously I have an interest here but I think great reporting is often overlooked and it's crazy because all of the effort involved in automation and writing tests is only valuable if everyone can see the benefits and resolve failures immediately.