Is There a Parallel Career Track Like Software Engineer in Test Automation?

I always get sort of confused what I see some of the bigger companies that have like a soft what is it like software engineer in test. It's, it was always just kind of confusing to me that. At the same time having programmers write automated tests was sort of becoming table stakes. And lots of companies wrote basically like Gherkin the cucumber DSL like cookbooks and all of the QA folks would like write those scripts. The problem is whenever anything went sideways or when you kind of added up all of the cost of that interaction from a performance perspective, which you know obviously the QA people don't have the experience to do.