About Astera Labs

Astera Labs is the connectivity backbone of rack-scale AI infrastructure. Our Active Electrical Cables (AEC), Smart Cable Modules (SCM), Silicon Evaluation Platforms, and rack-scale products deliver purpose-built, high-speed connectivity for the world's most demanding AI clusters. As our product portfolio expands in complexity, performance, and volume — and as OEM customers increasingly adopt Astera Labs silicon into their own designs — we need a senior engineering leader to build and scale the hardware design engineering organization that creates industry-defining products and enables our customers' success.

We are hiring a Senior Principal Engineer, AEC Product Integration to serve as the senior technical integration leader for Astera Labs' Active Electrical Cable product line. This is a deeply technical, hands-on individual contributor role at the most senior level — responsible for ensuring that every element of an AEC product (silicon, firmware, PCB/substrate, cable assembly, connector, mechanical, thermal, and signal integrity) comes together into a fully validated, production-ready, customer-qualified product.

You will be the single technical point of accountability for AEC product integration — the person who sees the complete picture, identifies gaps between disciplines, resolves cross-domain technical conflicts, and drives closure on the hardest integration challenges. You'll work at the intersection of hardware design, firmware, signal integrity, mechanical engineering, test, manufacturing, and customer applications — ensuring that Astera Labs' AEC products meet or exceed performance, quality, and reliability targets at scale.

Reporting to the AVP of AEC/SCM Hardware Engineering, you'll partner closely with engineering leads across all disciplines, as well as NPI, QA, validation, manufacturing, and customer engineering teams. You won't manage a large organization — instead, you'll lead through technical depth, cross-functional influence, and the ability to drive complex multi-variable problems to resolution.

Key Responsibilities

End-to-End Product Integration

• Own the technical integration of AEC products across all constituent domains: ASIC/retimer silicon, firmware, PCB/flex circuit, cable assembly, connector interface, mechanical housing, thermal management, and signal integrity

• Define and maintain the AEC product integration plan — identifying all cross-domain interfaces, dependencies, risks, and validation checkpoints from early design through mass production release

• Serve as the central technical authority who ensures all subsystem specifications are mutually consistent, physically realizable, and collectively deliver the target product performance

• Drive integration trade-off decisions when competing requirements across domains (e.g., signal integrity vs. mechanical, thermal vs. cost, firmware timing vs. test coverage) require resolution

• Own the AEC product-level specification, ensuring it flows coherently from system-level customer requirements down to component-level specifications for each engineering team

Signal Integrity & Electrical Performance Integration

• Ensure end-to-end channel performance meets target specifications across the full AEC link — from host connector, through PCB/substrate, retimer silicon, flex/cable medium, and far-end connector

• Partner with Signal Integrity engineers to validate channel models, S-parameter budgets, eye diagram margins, and compliance to relevant standards (IEEE 802.3ck/dj, OIF CEI-112G/224G)

• Drive resolution of signal integrity issues that span multiple domains — e.g., connector-to-PCB transition optimization, cable-to-substrate impedance matching, crosstalk between differential pairs in dense cable bundles<