I'm not minimaxir but anyway... that's an odd way to put it. My guess is, he/she is not the kind of software QA engineer you might be accustomed to depending on the kinds of companies you've worked at. Think of automated custom static and dynamic code analysis, continuous integration, build systems, deployment monitoring, etc. Places like Google and Stripe (and many other technical organizations with good engineering culture) have very skilled people doing these things.
I'm a normal/infrastructure engineer who reluctantly ends up focusing on test systems every once in a while. I get all the tests running, from a single script, with all results collated and machine readable, get CI set up properly, make the system reliable enough to trust, etc. Because someone has to do it! And yes I've done this in organizations where there was a QA engineer or two, who did reasonably cheap semi-automated QA, but couldn't put together a whole system and make it reliable enough to run on its own. But there are definitely a few places where QA engineer is not the "lowest rank".
I'm a normal/infrastructure engineer who reluctantly ends up focusing on test systems every once in a while. I get all the tests running, from a single script, with all results collated and machine readable, get CI set up properly, make the system reliable enough to trust, etc. Because someone has to do it! And yes I've done this in organizations where there was a QA engineer or two, who did reasonably cheap semi-automated QA, but couldn't put together a whole system and make it reliable enough to run on its own. But there are definitely a few places where QA engineer is not the "lowest rank".