When I got into software that employer was pretty small (50 people overall I think).

Their approach to QA was to have this be a optional thing the service people could do.

It worked surprisingly well, with the caveat that they never created regression tests.

The employer eventually switched someone from that team to establish these regression tests full time, but they had no programming experience and by the time I left no real progress was done in around 6 month. No idea what came of that, and a few years later they fired a lot of the team