Principal SerDes Bring-up Validation Engineer

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 .

Role Overview

Astera Labs is seeking a Principal SerDes Bring-up Validation Engineer to join a cutting-edge mixed-signal design team and lead end-to-end post-silicon bring-up, validation, and characterization. You will own bring-up and characterization strategies from the ground up, translating design and product requirements into measurable test objectives, pass/fail criteria, and schedules, and driving hands-on lab work to verify silicon against specification and performance targets. As a hyper-growth company building the purpose-built connectivity that powers rack-scale AI infrastructure, the speed and rigor of our silicon validation directly shape what we can ship. You will partner closely with AMS design, firmware, and system teams to build automated test frameworks, debug complex analog and digital interactions at the physical layer, and deliver clear, data-driven recommendations that influence product direction. This is a high-impact role for a deep technical expert who thrives on hands-on problem solving and mentoring across disciplines. Key Responsibilities Design, develop, and execute bring-up plans. Own end ‑ to ‑ end post ‑ silicon bring up and characterization strategies, translating design/product requirements into measurable test objectives, pass/fail criteria, and schedules. Drive design reviews and specification alignment. Participate in architecture and design ‑ spec reviews to ensure testability, trace requirements to verification plans, and influence design tradeoffs to meet performance and reliability targets. Lead hands ‑ on test execution and bring ‑ up. Perform silicon block level bring ‑ up, functional and parametric testing, interop checks, and performance benchmarking; rapidly iterate on test flows to accelerate time ‑ to ‑ data. Build and maintain automation frameworks. Develop scalable test automation, data capture, and analysis pipelines to increase throughput, reproducibility, and coverage across mixed ‑ signal test benches. Debug and optimize system performance. Diagnose complex failures and performance bottlenecks across analog, digital, firmware, and protocol layers; propose and validate corrective actions to improve stability, yield, and power/performance tradeoffs. Root ‑ cause cross ‑ domain failures. Trace issues to circuit, package, firmware, or protocol interactions using lab measurements, waveform analysis, and system ‑ level tests; coordinate with design, package, and firmware teams to implement fixes. Collaborate with cross ‑ functional teams. Work closely with mixed ‑ signal design, firmware, system engineering, and manufacturing to deliver detailed results, root ‑ cause analyses, optimization recommendations, and formal validation/compliance reports. Document findings and improve methodologies. Produce clear debug reports, formal characterization summaries, and recommendations for design/process/test improvements; contribute to failure analysis (FA) best practices and knowledge base. Develop test software and platform integrations. Write robust Python test scripts and control interfaces to configure, monitor, and collect status from multiple DSP and hardware platforms, improving firmware stability and automating regression suites. Measure and communicate impact. Define key validation metrics, track coverage and defect trends, and present data ‑ driven conclusions to stakeholders to influence product direction and release decisions.