Product Integration, Senior Principal - Active Electric Cable / Smart Cable Module Business

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 [](http://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 - ### Lead cross-domain integration reviews and design reviews — bringing together hardware, firmware, SI, mechanical, test, manufacturing, and quality engineers to assess readiness at each product milestone - ### Identify and escalate integration risks early — proposing mitigation plans and driving pre-emptive resolution before issues reach production or customer sites - ### Establish and document integration best practices, lessons learned, and reusable frameworks that improve efficiency across successive AEC product generations - ### Mentor engineers across disciplines on systems-level thinking and cross-domain integration methodology ### Manufacturing & NPI Integration - ### Partner with Manufacturing Engineering and NPI teams to ensure that the integrated AEC product design is manufacturable, testable, and scalable at volume - ### Participate in DFM/DFA/DFT reviews with a focus on integration-critical process steps (e.g., cable-to-substrate attachment, retimer placement, overmolding, connector alignment) - ### Support production ramp by driving resolution of integration-related yield issues, process excursions, or field failures that span multiple manufacturing operations - ### Define incoming inspection and in-process integration verification checkpoints to catch cross-domain defects early in the production flow --- ### Basic Qualifications