Role Overview

As a Principal Product Applications Engineer at Astera Labs, you will be at the forefront of enabling the world's leading cloud service providers and server/network OEMs to successfully deploy connectivity solutions. This high-impact role sits at the intersection of cutting-edge silicon, firmware, and customer success—where you'll tackle complex technical challenges that push the boundaries of AI infrastructure connectivity.

You will serve as a trusted technical advisor to strategic customers, guiding them through design-in, bring-up, and optimization of Astera Labs products. With a strong firmware orientation, you'll dive deep into embedded systems, debug intricate firmware-hardware interactions, and drive issues to resolution across the full stack. Your insights from the field will directly influence product roadmaps and engineering priorities, making you a critical bridge between customers and our R&D teams.

This is an opportunity to work on industry-defining connectivity products that power next-generation data centers and AI platforms—all within a fast-paced, hypergrowth environment where your contributions have immediate and visible impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Customer Technical Engagement
  • Provide expert technical guidance to tier-1 customers throughout the design-in lifecycle, from early evaluation through production deployment
  • Build trusted relationships with customer engineering teams, serving as the go-to resource for product integration
  • Deliver technical presentations, training sessions, and design reviews to accelerate customer success
• Firmware Debug & Issue Resolution
  • Investigate and reproduce customer-reported issues involving firmware, silicon, hardware design, and system-level interactions
  • Drive root cause analysis and coordinate cross-functional teams to deliver timely resolutions
  • Develop firmware-based tools, scripts, and utilities to streamline debug and validation workflows
• Technical Collateral & Knowledge Sharing
  • Create high-quality application notes, integration guides, and technical documentation for internal and external audiences
  • Provide actionable feedback to product, firmware, and silicon teams to continuously improve products and customer experience
  • Contribute to the development of reference designs and best practices for product deployment
• Lab Validation & Bring-Up
  • Execute hands-on silicon and system bring-up activities, including firmware validation and performance characterization
  • Utilize lab equipment such as protocol analyzers, high-speed oscilloscopes, and traffic generators to diagnose complex issues
  • Support interoperability testing across diverse customer platforms and configurations

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
• 8+ years of experience in product applications, field applications, or systems engineering roles supporting complex semiconductor products
• Strong firmware development and debugging skills, including proficiency in embedded C and Python
• Experience with high-speed interfaces such as PCIe Gen5/6/7 or Ethernet
• Demonstrated ability to triage and resolve multi-layer issues spanning silicon, firmware, and system environments
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with a track record of producing clear technical documentation

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field
• Experience with Ethernet products, retimers, or PCIe connectivity solutions
• Hands-on experience with protocol analyzers, high-speed oscilloscopes, and BERTs
• Background working directly with cloud service providers, server OEMs, or networking equipment manufacturers
• Understanding of data center architectures including servers, AI platforms, JBOGs/JBODs, and network switches
• Familiarity with physical layer concepts and signal integrity fundamentals

The base salary range for this role is CAD 180,000 – CAD 205,000. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. You will also be eligible for a performance bonus, equity, and benefits.

Astera Labs is seeking an exceptional Director of System Validation to lead our AI Fabric Validation organization. Connectivity is a critical component of every AI accelerator deployment and hyperscale data center architecture. As part of the AI Fabric Engineering group, you will play a key role in ensuring that Astera Labs’ fabric solutions perform at scale and deliver system-level performance across the most demanding AI and ML workloads. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape validation strategy for cutting-edge connectivity silicon and gain deep insight into next-generation AI infrastructure platforms. Your primary responsibility will be to build and lead a world-class validation organization tasked with validating all silicon, firmware, and system-level solutions at scale, ensuring performance, reliability, and production readiness across customer deployments. 

Job Description 

• Seeking a strong technical leader who has delivered multiple SoC products. 
• Lead and scale the system validation organization for Astera Labs' AI fabric portfolio, building a high-performing team across multiple concurrent product programs. 
• Understand the performance and functionality requirements of our AI fabric switches to enable customers to develop Data Center systems using Astera Labs' connectivity products for AI and ML applications. 
• Own comprehensive validation strategies for AI fabric switch products. Drive execution through scalable automation platforms and data-centric testing with automated reporting and specification compliance verification. 
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Architecture, Hardware, Firmware, and Software teams to influence product requirements and ensure validation excellence. 
• Ensure timely bringup of new silicon and platforms, driving rootcause analysis and crossfunctional debug of hardware, firmware, and system issues. 
• Deliver high confidence validation results that support product qualification, customer sampling, and mass production readiness. 
• Engage directly with key customers to understand their requirements and highlight the unique capabilities of Astera Labs' solutions. 
• The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in silicon/system validation, a strong architectural mindset, and a proven ability to scale organizations in fastmoving, highperformance computing environments. 
• Work closely with silicon design, architecture, Firmware, software engineering teams to ensure cohesive validation strategies. 
• Drive a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement. 
• Manage resource planning, and vendor/partner relationships. 

Basic Qualifications 

• Strong academic background in Electrical or Computer Engineering. Bachelor's required, Master's preferred. 
• ≥15 years' experience supporting or developing complex SoC/silicon products for Server, Storage, Networking applications and highperformance hardware companies. 
• ≥5 years hands-on experience with Silicon/System bring-up, validation, and debug, including in customer systems. 
• ≥2 years building high performance Engineering teams and validation methodologies. 
• Deep understanding of CPU, GPU, SoC, or AI/ML accelerator architectures, including memory subsystems, I/O, power management, and firmware interactions. 
• Expertise in validation methodologies: presilicon simulation/emulation, postsilicon bringup, system validation, stress testing, and performance characterization. 
• Strong background in debug methodologies, lab infrastructure, and automation frameworks. 
• Excellent communication skills and ability to influence executives and crossfunctional partners. 
• Entrepreneurial, open-minded behavior and can-do attitude. Think and act with the customer in mind! 

Preferred Experience: 

• ≥5 years leading validation teams planning, execution and maintaining project visibility. 
• ≥10 years hands-on experience with Silicon/System bring-up, validation, and debug, including in customer systems. 
• Thorough knowledge of high-speed protocols like PCIe, CXL, NVMe, or Ethernet. 
• Deep understanding of High-Speed Signaling Principles and x86/ARM architecture, UEFI/Linux boot sequence. 

The base salary range is $200,000 CAD - $250,000 CAD. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions.  

At Astera Labs, we design cutting-edge connectivity solutions that power the world’s largest cloud service providers, server, and networking OEMs. As a Platform Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in building and supporting the platforms that enable these products to thrive in real-world deployments through. 

You’ll create and maintain tools that make our products seamless to integrate, highly debuggable, and delightful to use for both customers and internal engineering teams. Your work will span software, systems, and silicon – developing automation, diving into labs with state-of-the-art equipment, and collaborating closely with customers to solve the toughest technical challenges. Beyond execution, you’ll influence product direction by driving innovation, providing feedback to design teams, and streamlining validation and deployment processes. 

This is a high-impact, hands-on role at the intersection of hardware and software, where curiosity, creativity, and technical depth come together to define the next generation of data center infrastructure. 

Basic Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science. 
• 5+ years of experience in software development with C, C++, C#, and/or Python. 
• Entrepreneurial mindset with a customer-first attitude and a bias toward action. 

Required Experience 

• Building and maintaining complex applications using .NET technologies (e.g., WPF, Avalonia, Blazor, MAUI). 
• Strong background in C and Python programming for tool development, automation, and system interaction. 
• Hands-on silicon/system bring-up and debug experience in customer environments. 
• Proficiency with lab equipment such as traffic generators, analyzers, and high-speed oscilloscopes. 
• Excellent technical writing skills for clear, concise documentation (datasheets, app notes, internal guides). 

Preferred Experience 

• Front-end technologies (React, Angular, Node.js). 
• Cloud development platforms (Azure, AWS). 
• Experience with high-speed I/O products (PCIe, Ethernet Switches). 
• Familiarity with data center architectures: servers, storage (JBOD/JBOG), and networking gear. 

What You’ll Gain 

• Impact: Influence the design and usability of products deployed at hyperscale. 
• Breadth: Work across hardware, firmware, and software layers. 
• Growth: Collaborate with world-class engineers and customers solving real-world challenges at scale. 
• Innovation: Freedom to prototype, improve, and bring new ideas into production. 

The base pay range for this role is between $140,000 and $175,000. Your actual base pay will depend on variables that may include your background, qualifications, and experience. 

Role Overview 

Astera Labs is seeking System Validation Engineers across multiple levels to lead post‑silicon bring‑up and system validation for high‑performance PCIe and CXL memory expansion products used in AI and cloud data centers. You will design and execute validation plans, automate data‑centric test flows, drive root‑cause investigations across silicon, firmware, hardware, and systems, and work directly with customers to validate real world performance and interoperability. 

This role is based in our Vancouver office, which is a strategic growth hub for Astera Labs' validation team. You'll have the opportunity to be a foundational member of this expanding site while collaborating closely with our core team in San Jose. This is a unique chance to help shape the team's culture, processes, and technical direction as we scale our validation capabilities to meet surging demand for AI infrastructure connectivity. 

What Success Looks Like: 

• New silicon and platforms brought up on schedule with reproducible validation results 
• Automated test suites that reduce manual effort and provide clear pass/fail and performance metrics 
• Rapid, data-backed root-cause resolution of system issues and strong customer satisfaction during integration 

Key Responsibilities 

• Validation Planning & Strategy 
• Create comprehensive validation plans for AI fabric switch products covering functionality, performance, reliability, and interoperability 
• Contribute to compliance testing strategies and adapt consortium test cases for execution from x86 and ARM platforms 
• Produce clear, data-driven validation reports and status updates for internal stakeholders and customers 
• Silicon & System Bring-Up 
• Lead silicon and platform bring-up activities, verify boot and runtime behavior on x86 and ARM systems 
• Ensure timely readiness for customer engagements and product launches 
• Debug complex issues across PCIe, CXL, NVMe, Ethernet, firmware, and hardware layers using protocol analyzers, logic analyzers, and CPU-based tool suites 
• Test Automation & Infrastructure 
• Develop robust, repeatable automation for IC and board testing with emphasis on execution efficiency, data collection, analysis, and automated reporting 
• Design experiments to root-cause unexpected behavior and report results and specification compliance in an automated fashion 
• Customer & Cross-Functional Collaboration 
• Collaborate directly with customers to capture system requirements, reproduce customer scenarios, and demonstrate product capabilities 
• Drive cross-functional root-cause analysis with silicon, firmware, hardware, and system teams and document findings and corrective actions 

Basic Qualifications 

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field 
• 2-12+ years of experience supporting or developing complex SoC or silicon products for server, storage, or networking domains (level dependent) 
• Working understanding of x86 and ARM architectures and UEFI/Linux boot sequences 
• Solid grasp of high-speed signaling principles 
• Hands-on experience with high-speed protocols such as PCIe, CXL, NVMe, or Ethernet 
• Proven experience in silicon and system bring-up, validation, and debug in lab and customer environments 
• Strong Python automation skills for bench control, test orchestration, data analysis, and reporting 
• Experience with lab equipment including protocol analyzers, logic analyzers, in-circuit debuggers, and CPU-based tool suites 
• Strong prioritization, planning, and independent execution skills with a customer-focused mindset 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field 
• Working knowledge of C or C++ for embedded firmware and device drivers 
• Familiarity with PCIe compliance standards and experience adapting consortium tests for platform execution 
• Advanced understanding of memory architectures, high-speed signaling, and system boot flows 
• Track record of influencing cross-functional teams and navigating complex matrixed organizations 
• Entrepreneurial, can-do attitude with ability to think and act with the customer in mind 

The base salary range for this role is $125,000 - $290,000 CAD depending on experience, level, and business need. This role may be eligible for discretionary bonus, incentives and benefits.