Product Integration, Senior Principal - Active Electric Cable / Smart Cable Module Business
Principal
Description
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 .
About Astera Labs
Astera Labs is the connectivity backbone of rack-scale AI infrastructure. Our Active Electrical Cables (AEC), Smart Cable Modules (SCM), Silicon Evaluation Platforms, and rack-scale products deliver purpose-built, high-speed connectivity for the world's most demanding AI clusters. As our product portfolio expands in complexity, performance, and volume — and as OEM customers increasingly adopt Astera Labs silicon into their own designs — we need a senior engineering leader to build and scale the hardware design engineering organization that creates industry-defining products and enables our customers' success.
We are hiring a Senior Principal Engineer, AEC Product Integration to serve as the senior technical integration leader for Astera Labs' Active Electrical Cable product line. This is a deeply technical, hands-on individual contributor role at the most senior level — responsible for ensuring that every element of an AEC product (silicon, firmware, PCB/substrate, cable assembly, connector, mechanical, thermal, and signal integrity) comes together into a fully validated, production-ready, customer-qualified product.
You will be the single technical point of accountability for AEC product integration — the person who sees the complete picture, identifies gaps between disciplines, resolves cross-domain technical conflicts, and drives closure on the hardest integration challenges. You'll work at the intersection of hardware design, firmware, signal integrity, mechanical engineering, test, manufacturing, and customer applications — ensuring that Astera Labs' AEC products meet or exceed performance, quality, and reliability targets at scale.
Reporting to the AVP of AEC/SCM Hardware Engineering, you'll partner closely with engineering leads across all disciplines, as well as NPI, QA, validation, manufacturing, and customer engineering teams. You won't manage a large organization — instead, you'll lead through technical depth, cross-functional influence, and the ability to drive complex multi-variable problems to resolution.
Key Responsibilities
End-to-End Product Integration
-
Own the technical integration of AEC products across all constituent domains: ASIC/retimer silicon, firmware, PCB/flex circuit, cable assembly, connector interface, mechanical housing, thermal management, and signal integrity
-
Define and maintain the AEC product integration plan — identifying all cross-domain interfaces, dependencies, risks, and validation checkpoints from early design through mass production release
-
Serve as the central technical authority who ensures all subsystem specifications are mutually consistent, physically realizable, and collectively deliver the target product performance
-
Drive integration trade-off decisions when competing requirements across domains (e.g., signal integrity vs. mechanical, thermal vs. cost, firmware timing vs. test coverage) require resolution
-
Own the AEC product-level specification, ensuring it flows coherently from system-level customer requirements down to component-level specifications for each engineering team
Signal Integrity & Electrical Performance Integration
-
Ensure end-to-end channel performance meets target specifications across the full AEC link — from host connector, through PCB/substrate, retimer silicon, flex/cable medium, and far-end connector
-
Partner with Signal Integrity engineers to validate channel models, S-parameter budgets, eye diagram margins, and compliance to relevant standards (IEEE 802.3ck/dj, OIF CEI-112G/224G)
-
Drive resolution of signal integrity issues that span multiple domains — e.g., connector-to-PCB transition optimization, cable-to-substrate impedance matching, crosstalk between differential pairs in dense cable bundles
-
Define and enforce electrical interface specifications at every integration boundary (silicon-to-substrate, substrate-to-cable, cable-to-connector, connector-to-host)
Hardware & Mechanical Integration
-
Coordinate the physical integration of retimer silicon, passive components, flex circuits or PCBs, cable assemblies, and mechanical housings into a unified AEC product form factor
-
Work with Mechanical Engineering to ensure connector mating, latching, strain relief, bend radius, thermal dissipation, and form factor compliance are achieved within customer and standards requirements
-
Drive resolution of mechanical-electrical conflicts (e.g., routing density vs. housing volume, thermal solution vs. weight/form factor, strain relief vs. cable flexibility)
-
Review and approve mechanical drawings, 3D models, tolerance stacks, and assembly sequences for AEC products
Firmware & Silicon Integration
-
Partner with Firmware Engineering to ensure retimer/re-driver firmware initialization, link training, equalization, and diagnostic features integrate correctly with the AEC hardware platform
-
Define firmware-hardware interface requirements — including power sequencing, thermal monitoring/throttling, I2C/CMIS register maps, and in-field diagnostic capabilities
-
Drive debug and root-cause analysis of integration issues that span silicon, firmware, and hardware boundaries (e.g., link instability tied to power delivery transients, equalization failures tied to channel asymmetry)
-
Ensure AEC products comply with relevant management interface standards (CMIS, SFF-8636, or proprietary host interfaces)
Test & Validation Integration
-
Define the AEC product-level validation plan — ensuring comprehensive coverage across electrical performance, mechanical durability, environmental reliability, firmware functionality, and interoperability
-
Partner with Test Engineering to specify end-of-line production test requirements that validate all critical integration parameters without excessive test time
-
Drive cross-domain failure analysis when product-level test failures cannot be attributed to a single subsystem — marshaling resources across SI, hardware, firmware, and mechanical teams to identify root cause
-
Own the integration test phase during NPI — defining entry/exit criteria, managing issue trackers, driving closure, and making go/no-go recommendations for production readiness
Customer Integration & Interoperability
-
Serve as the senior technical interface for AEC product integration with customer platforms — understanding host ASIC requirements, switch/NIC compatibility, rack-level cabling architectures, and system-level thermal/mechanical constraints
-
Drive interoperability testing and debug with customer hardware, resolving link-level issues that may involve Astera Labs' AEC, customer host silicon, or system-level environmental factors
-
Translate customer integration feedback into actionable engineering requirements and design improvements for current and future AEC generations
-
Support customer qualification activities by providing technical data packages, integration guides, and direct engineering engagement
Cross-Functional Technical Leadership
-