Senior Principal ASIC Design 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.Senior Principal ASIC Design Engineer Location: Germany (on-site) Role Overview Astera Labs is building purpose-built silicon for rack-scale AI infrastructure. As a Distinguished Engineer, you will be a senior technical leader driving ASIC design for next-generation Ethernet and Scale-Up (ESUN) connectivity products. You will set technical direction across the full ASIC design flow, spanning high-speed Ethernet, UALink, UCIe, and PCIe Gen 6/7. You will solve complex scale-up networking challenges, mentor senior engineers, and turn ambitious product goals into robust, manufacturable silicon. Technical Leadership & Architecture Define and drive ASIC architecture for Ethernet/ESUN connectivity products across UALink, UCIe, PCIe Gen 6/7, and Ethernet. Lead architecture and microarchitecture for high-performance Ethernet controllers, MACs, NIC datapaths, packet processing pipelines, and AI interconnect fabrics. Define scalable, low-latency, high-bandwidth data movement, scheduling, buffering, congestion management, QoS, reliability, and flow control. Architect hardware acceleration for NIC functions, RDMA, DMA, virtualization, and protocol offloads. Lead tradeoff analysis across performance, power, area, latency, scalability, resiliency, and programmability. Serve as a technical authority across digital, networking, and system domains. ASIC Design & Execution Lead RTL design and microarchitecture development for Ethernet controllers, MACs, NIC datapaths, protocol engines, and AI networking subsystems. Design packet processing architectures, DMA engines, queue management, scheduling, buffering, and memory subsystem interfaces. Develop hardware mechanisms for RDMA, zero-copy data movement, congestion control, transport reliability, and protocol acceleration. Design scalable architectures supporting virtualization, multi-tenant isolation, traffic management, and quality of service. Partner with firmware and software teams to define hardware/software interfaces for initialization, management, telemetry, performance monitoring, and diagnostics. Drive execution from architecture through RTL, integration, verification, tapeout, and post-silicon bring-up. Partner cross-functionally to ...