Principal Product Applications Engineer, Custom Silicon

The Opportunity

Astera Labs is seeking a Principal Product Applications Engineer to serve as the technical bridge between our customers and engineering organization.

In this highly customer-facing role, you will work directly with hyperscalers, AI infrastructure providers, and strategic OEM customers to support custom silicon programs from early architecture discussions through production deployment. You'll partner with Product Management, Architecture, ASIC Design, Firmware, Validation, and Software Engineering to ensure customer requirements are translated into successful products while helping customers deploy next-generation AI infrastructure.

This is not a traditional pre-sales Field Applications Engineer role, nor is it an internal validation position. You will combine deep technical expertise with strong customer engagement to solve complex system-level challenges and influence future silicon development.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical interface for strategic customer programs.
• Develop trusted technical relationships with customer engineering teams and become a key advisor throughout the product lifecycle.
• Support customer engagements from architecture discussions through silicon bring-up, validation, production, and deployment.
• Lead complex customer debug efforts involving hardware, firmware, software, and system-level integration.
• Translate customer requirements, deployment challenges, and architecture feedback into actionable engineering requirements.
• Collaborate closely with Product Management, Architecture, ASIC Design, Firmware, Validation, and Software Engineering to drive customer success.
• Influence future silicon products by providing customer insights and technical feedback to engineering teams.
• Support customer design reviews, architecture discussions, technical training, and executive-level technical engagements.
• Develop technical collateral, application notes, reference designs, troubleshooting guides, and customer documentation.
• Support technical escalations and drive issues to resolution across cross-functional engineering teams.
• Develop automation and diagnostic tools using Python or C/C++ to improve engineering efficiency and customer support.
• Travel to customer sites as needed to support key design wins and strategic engagements.

Required Qualifications

• BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
• 10+ years of experience in Product Applications Engineering, Systems Engineering, Customer Engineering, Field Applications Engineering, or a related customer-facing semiconductor role.
• Experience supporting advanced semiconductor or custom silicon products from architecture through production.
• Strong understanding of high-speed interconnect technologies, including Ethernet (through 800G), PCIe, PAM4, SerDes, DSPs, DAC, AEC, ACC, AOC, and related hardware technologies.
• Experience with silicon bring-up, post-silicon validation, and system-level debugging.
• Strong Linux debugging and troubleshooting experience.
• Experience writing Python or C/C++ scripts for automation, diagnostics, firmware validation, or lab workflows.
• Proven experience working directly with hyperscalers, cloud providers, enterprise customers, or major OEMs.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and technical leadership skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting AI infrastructure platforms or high-performance computing systems.
• Familiarity with custom ASIC development and customer-specific silicon solutions.
• Experience with firmware, embedded software, or FPGA validation.
• Understanding of networking, storage, memory, or accelerator architectures.
• Experience creating customer-facing technical documentation, training materials, and application notes.
• Experience supporting executive customer reviews and technical design discussions.

Salary range is $185,000 to $210,000 depending on experience, level, and business need. This role may be eligible for discretionary bonus, incentives, and benefits.