Product Application Engineer, Principal

Astera Labs (NASDAQ: ALAB) provides rack-scale AI infrastructure through purpose-built connectivity solutions. By collaborating with hyperscalers and ecosystem partners, Astera Labs enables organizations to unlock the full potential of modern AI. Astera Labs’ Intelligent Connectivity Platform integrates CXL®, Ethernet, NVLink, PCIe®, and UALink™ semiconductor-based technologies with the company’s COSMOS software suite to unify diverse components into cohesive, flexible systems that deliver end-to-end scale-up, and scale-out connectivity. The company’s custom connectivity solutions business complements its standards-based portfolio, enabling customers to deploy tailored architectures to meet their unique infrastructure requirements. Discover more at www.asteralabs.com.

• Customer Technical Leadership
• Serve as the principal technical authority for optical solutions across hyperscale and AI platform customers, driving architecture reviews, design-ins, and deployment escalations.
• Deliver technical documentations, product training, and demonstrations to customer engineering teams
• Build trusted advisor relationships with key customers or partners and drive product adoption
• System & Link Debug and Validation Support
• Support customer lab bring-up, characterization, debug of links covering optical and electrical co-design, SerDes tuning, link training, and system validation.
• Lead root cause analysis and debugging of end-to-end signal/power integrity, interoperability, and protocol issues in customer systems.
• Develop reference test methodologies, lab automation, and debug playbooks adopted across customer base.
• Cross-Functional Engineering Partnership
• Partner with silicon, firmware, hardware, and product teams to root-cause complex issues and drive design improvements back into the product line.
• Collaborate with optical module and ecosystem partners on packaging interfaces, thermal/mechanical integration, and reliability.
• Influence next-gen optical architecture and feature definition based on field learnings and customer roadmaps.
• Technical Documentation & Field Excellence
• Create product documentation including datasheets, application notes, integration and user guides.
• Mentor application and field engineers, raising the bar on technical depth in optics, high-speed SerDes, and switching systems.
• Represent Astera Labs at industry forums, standards bodies, and customer technology summits as an optical subject-matter expert.

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Photonics, Physics, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of applications, systems, or design engineering experience in high-speed connectivity, optics, or networking silicon.
• Deep expertise in high-speed SerDes and physical layer fundamentals (channel modeling, equalization, jitter, BER, link training).
• Hands-on experience with at least one of: PCIe Gen 5/6/7, UALink, or 400G/800G/1.6T Ethernet.
• Proven track record working directly with hyperscale or Tier-1 customers on optical integration, system bring-up, debug, and production deployment.
• Experience debugging high-speed serial in