Sr. Hardware Optical Engineer

As a Sr. Hardware Optical Electrical Engineer at Astera Labs, you will join our dedicated Hardware Engineering team working alongside ASIC Engineering. You will be responsible for designing boards incorporating Astera Labs’ diverse range of connectivity and memory products widely used by leading cloud service providers, server manufacturers, and network OEMs. You will be involved in every stage of design, from concept to mass production.

In addition to your core responsibilities, you will have the opportunity to drive innovation within the organization by providing insightful feedback to internal teams. Your expertise and suggestions will contribute to continuously improving our products and processes. You may also collaborate on or even lead closely related activities, such as manufacturing, customer engagement, and post-production support.

This role provides opportunities for direct interaction with key customers. You will have the chance to solicit their input on form factors and propose comprehensive board products that meet their specific needs. We seek an ideal candidate who brings industry experience, possesses innovative thinking, and demonstrates a high level of expertise in their field. Moreover, you should exhibit a proactive “do what it takes” attitude, always ready to assist and contribute wherever necessary to solve problems and achieve successful outcomes effectively.

Basic Qualifications:

• Strong academic and technical background in electrical engineering.

• Bachelor’s in EE is required; a Master’s is preferred.

• Minimum of 5 years experience in system-level board design, from component selection and schematic capture through board bring-up, debug, optimization, and validation.

Required Experience:

• Strong background in high-speed board design techniques and methodologies, preferably in the enterprise and data center system space, such as PCIe add-in cards, servers, JBOGs/JBODs, networking switches/routers/interconnects, optics, active electrical cables, etc.

• Knowledge of schematic capture and PCB layout tools from Cadence, Altium, and others.

• Working knowledge of Allegro layout tool (for reviewing designs)

• Working knowledge of power architecture in both circuit (DC/DC POL converters) and distribution (power integrity)

• Understanding of signal and power integrity challenges and solutions

• Designing systems with high-speed NRZ/PAM4 SerDes-based protocols such as PCIe (3.0 and above), Ethernet (25G and above), etc., and/or memory interfaces such as (LP)DDR4/5.

• Strong experience in board bring-up and validation

• Silicon/PCB bring-up and debug experience.

• Track record of taking products from concept to mass production

• Experience working with contract manufacturers, PCB vendors, and other external suppliers

Preferred experience

• Working with mechanical and thermal teams to create achievable system design specifications.

• Hardware design around FPGAs and MCUs, including pin mapping and evaluating different SKUs against a list of hardware requirements.

• Experience designing PCIe/CEM cards, paddle cards/active copper cable applications.

• Designing complete high-speed channels may include IC sockets, connectors, and cables.

• Working with silicon characterization/validation teams to ensure device performance is readily achievable in customer systems.

• Working with off-shore CMs

• Technical writing skills to generate clear, precise documentation such as hardware specifications and user guides for internal and customer-facing audiences.

• Experience in “adjacent” areas such as manufacturing, quality, and compliance.