What's Really Happening with Selenium Tester Right Now
Selenium-titled roles are increasingly maintenance and migration roles, and that is worth understanding before you negotiate. A large share of current openings involve an ageing suite that someone needs to stabilise, containerise, or gradually port to a newer stack. That work is unglamorous and extremely well-supported by budget, because the business cannot ship without the regression pack passing. Pay reflects the maintenance reality: stable mid bands, weaker premiums at the top than Playwright or SDET roles, but strong job security and, in the enterprise segment, plenty of it.
What we'd actually recommend
Price migration experience explicitly. If you have run a coexistence period — new tests in a modern framework while keeping the Selenium estate alive and green — say so in the first line of your resume, because it is exactly what hiring managers with legacy suites are searching for and very few candidates advertise it. If you have not done one, engineer the opportunity at your current job: add one modern-framework test alongside the existing suite, get both running in the same pipeline, and you now have the story that unlocks the higher band.
The pitfall: accepting the legacy-maintenance band as a ceiling
Testers in Selenium maintenance roles often assume their pay is capped by the tool and either resign themselves to it or leave entirely. Both are avoidable. The band tracks the scope of what you own, not the framework name — the same person, on the same suite, moves up substantially by taking ownership of the pipeline, the environments, and the flake budget. The misconception is that changing tools raises your salary; in practice changing the size of the problem you own does.