It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.

But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).

Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.