I have been in discussion with lots of QA folks since last week and have found that most of them are facing the same problem where they are hired for the role of automation engineer, however, what they do in their day to day activity is pure Manual testing of the features and this is actually hitting their skills and performance.
A candidate is asked to go through a lot of technical rounds like coding, discussing technical stuff related to automated testing and also on CI/CD, Pipelines, approach towards Mobile, API and Web automation, and in the end, what is offered, is a job where you are asked to test things manually.
If you are also facing this, stop fearing and stressing yourself out! I have some suggestions for you!
Some Suggestion which could help you in understanding the role and approaching towards a better solution to the problem.
Have a one to one discussion with your Project Manager or Lead about your role and understand the expectation they have set for you. Mention about the expectations that you have with regards to your role and career.
Check out the feasibility of automating the tests, like for example, you feel that there are areas in the product for which testing can be automated to minimize the manual efforts. Go ahead, create a plan which has details about the user journey that you think can be automated and whether the approach is with API/Web/Mobile, a test strategy would help here, discuss with the same with your Leads and developer and mention how it can make the team's life easier.
Discuss about how you can make the things better by automating the stuff that is performed manually and how it can save the team's time and how it can minimize the release time as well for releasing the product to the end users'.
I have seen many a times that due to manual efforts like performing Sanity/Smoke tests manually, it takes lot of time and in case if there is a bug identified it might delay the release.
Talk to the developers in the team and discuss if you can help them in writing unit or integration tests thereby leveraging your skills as an automation engineer.
If nothing works as per the suggestion above, follow this piece of advice:
Start practicing and keep your skills sharpened by self-learning and be updated with the latest trends in software testing. Opportunity can knock the door anytime. ;)