Senior Principal Engineer - Field Applications

Location: San Jose, California, United States

Department: Field Applications

Role Overview

As a Senior Principal Engineer - Field Applications Engineering, you will serve as a trusted technical partner to customers deploying Astera Labs’ high-speed connectivity solutions. You will lead the continuation of critical customer support for Ethernet and PCIe products, translating system requirements into reliable, production-ready designs and accelerating issue resolution across complex AI infrastructure platforms.

Based onsite in San Jose, you will work closely with customers and cross-functional teams across sales, product management, design engineering, validation, and operations. Your expertise in high-speed interfaces, physical-layer behavior, and system-level integration will help customers bring next-generation rack-scale AI architectures to market with confidence.

Key Responsibilities

• Customer Technical Leadership
  • Lead technical engagements with strategic customers from architecture definition through deployment and production support.
  • Own customer escalations, establish clear action plans, and drive issues to timely closure with measurable outcomes.
  • Present design recommendations, bring-up results, and technical tradeoffs to customer engineering and leadership teams.
• Ethernet and PCIe Product Support
  • Develop and execute system-level debug plans for Ethernet and PCIe connectivity issues, including link training, interoperability, compliance, and performance.
  • Analyze physical-layer behavior, signal-integrity symptoms, error logs, lab data, and system telemetry to isolate root causes.
  • Partner with engineering teams to reproduce field issues, influence product improvements, and communicate effective workarounds or corrective actions.
• Cross-Functional Enablement
  • Collaborate with sales and product management to capture customer requirements and shape application strategies for emerging AI infrastructure designs.
  • Create technical collateral, reference architectures, application notes, and enablement materials for customers and internal teams.
  • Mentor Field Applications Engineers and contribute to scalable processes for customer onboarding, issue tracking, and product adoption.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 12–20 years of experience in field applications engineering, system engineering, product engineering, or a related domain.
• Deep hands-on experience with Ethernet and/or PCIe systems, high-speed SerDes, link training, interoperability, and compliance.
• Strong understanding of physical-layer concepts, signal integrity, board-level bring-up, lab instrumentation, and system-level debug.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex customer escalations, debug, and communicate technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences.
• Ability to work onsite in San Jose and travel to customer and partner locations as needed.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with PCIe Gen 5/6/7, high-speed Ethernet, retimers, redrivers, signal-conditioning and scale-up, scale-out solutions.
• Familiarity with server, accelerator, switch, NIC, storage, or other data-center platform architectures.
• Experience developing reference designs, validation plans, interoperability strategies, or customer-facing technical documentation.
• Proven record of influencing cross-functional teams and mentoring technical professionals in a fast-moving, high-growth environment.

Salary range is $205,000 to $260,000 depending on experience, level, and business need. This role may be eligible for discretionary bonus, incentives and benefits.