Hardware Design Engineering - OEM, Silicon Validation Platforms & Rack-Scale Design

We are hiring a Director of Hardware Design Engineering — OEM, Silicon Validation Platforms & Rack-Scale Design to establish and lead Astera Labs' Taiwan hardware engineering center. This role serves as the primary hardware engineering hub for OEM customer engagement across Asia, while simultaneously owning the design and development of Silicon Validation Platforms (SVB/EVB) and rack-scale products (AI chassis, switch trays, CEM cards).

This is a high-impact leadership role that combines three critical functions:

1. OEM Design Enablement & Customer Support — Serving as the front-line hardware engineering partner for OEM customers in Asia (hyperscale cloud, server/switch OEMs, cable/module manufacturers) who are integrating Astera Labs silicon into their own products

2. Silicon Validation Platform Design (SVB/EVB) — Designing and delivering the evaluation boards and system validation platforms that enable silicon bring-up, characterization, customer evaluation, and reference design seeding

3. Rack-Scale Product Design — Designing AI chassis-class systems, switch trays, CEM cards, and system-level hardware that showcase Astera Labs' full connectivity portfolio

You will build and lead a multidisciplinary hardware engineering team in Taiwan — spanning electrical/PCB design, mechanical engineering, validation, and customer applications engineering. You'll serve as the senior Astera Labs hardware engineering leader in Asia, partnering with OEM customers, ODM partners, and contract manufacturers while maintaining tight alignment with the Santa Clara-based engineering organization.

Reporting to the Senior Director of Hardware Design Engineering, you'll operate with significant autonomy while ensuring strategic alignment on technology roadmap, design standards, and customer priorities.

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Key Responsibilities

Taiwan Engineering Center Leadership

• Establish, build, and lead Astera Labs' Taiwan hardware engineering center as the company's primary Asia-based hub for OEM engagement, silicon platform design, and rack-scale product development

• Recruit, hire, and develop a high-caliber multidisciplinary engineering team in Taiwan, including:

  • Hardware/PCB design engineers

  • Mechanical engineers

  • Validation engineers

  • Customer/applications hardware engineers

  • Lab engineers

• Define organizational structure, hiring roadmap, and operating model for the Taiwan center — balancing local autonomy with global alignment

• Establish lab infrastructure in Taiwan to support silicon platform bring-up, customer demonstrations, OEM design reviews, interoperability testing, and rack-scale system validation

• Drive engineering culture that emphasizes customer responsiveness, design excellence, and tight collaboration with Santa Clara headquarters

• Serve as the senior Astera Labs engineering leader in Asia — representing the company with customers, partners, and industry stakeholders in the region

OEM Design Enablement & Customer Engagement

• Customer Design Support:

  • Serve as the primary hardware engineering interface for OEM customers in Asia who are designing Astera Labs silicon (retimers, re-drivers, connectivity ASICs) into their own products

  • Provide expert-level design review support for customer hardware designs — reviewing schematics, PCB layouts, stackups, power delivery networks, thermal solutions, and signal integrity

  • Deliver hands-on technical engagement during customer design cycles — from initial architecture consultation through prototype bring-up, debug, and production readiness

  • Support customer hardware debug and troubleshooting when integration challenges arise — coordinating across internal teams (silicon, firmware, SI, validation) to provide rapid root-cause analysis and corrective guidance

  • Travel to customer sites across Asia (Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea) to provide on-site design review, bring-up support, and integration assistance for critical programs

• Reference Design & Design Collateral Development:

  • Develop and maintain production-quality reference designs for Astera Labs silicon — including reference schematics, recommended PCB layouts, stackup guidelines, power delivery reference circuits, and thermal design examples

  • Create comprehensive hardware design guides, integration manuals, application notes, and best-practice documentation that enable OEM customers to achieve first-pass success

  • Develop design review checklists and self-assessment tools for OEM customers, supplemented by Astera Labs expert review at critical milestones

  • Ensure reference designs and collateral evolve with each silicon generation and incorporate lessons learned from customer engagements

• OEM Relationship Management:

  • Build deep, trust-based technical relationships with hardware engineering teams at key OEM customers — becoming their preferred technical partner for Astera Labs silicon integration

  • Partner with Sales, FAE, and Product Management teams to identify high-value customer engagements and prioritize hardware engineering support resources

  • Participate in customer roadmap discussions, providing hardware engineering perspective on future silicon requirements, package options, and platform integration considerations

  • Capture common customer design challenges, failure modes, and feature requests — feeding these back into reference designs, design guides, evaluation platforms, and silicon requirements

  • Support joint development programs with strategic OEM partners — including co-designed products, custom form factors, and platform-specific optimizations

Silicon Validation Platform Design (SVB/EVB)

• Platform Architecture & Design:

  • Own the architecture, design, and delivery of Silicon Validation Boards (SVB) and Evaluation Boards (EVB) for all Astera Labs silicon products — retimers, re-drivers, PCIe/CXL switches, and connectivity ASICs

  • Design complex multi-layer PCBs optimized for silicon bring-up, characterization, and performance demonstration — including high-speed channel routing, configurable topology options, comprehensive power delivery, and debug/instrumentation access

  • Ensure evaluation platforms provide optimal silicon exercising capability — enabling full characterization of all silicon features, performance modes, and operational corners

  • Design platforms that serve dual purposes: internal silicon validation and external customer evaluation/demonstration

  • Create modular, scalable platform architectures that can be efficiently adapted across silicon generations with minimal redesign

• Silicon Bring-Up & Characterization Support:

  • Partner with silicon design and validation teams to ensure SVB/EVB designs support all required bring-up sequences, test modes, and characterization scenarios

  • Support initial silicon bring-up activities on new platforms — providing hardware debug expertise and rapid board-level modifications as needed

  • Ensure platform designs enable comprehensive performance characterization — including high-speed link testing, power measurement, thermal characterization, and margin analysis

  • Design instrumentation access (probe points, headers, measurement interfaces) that enables efficient silicon debug without compromising signal integrity

• Customer Evaluation Enablement:

  • Design evaluation platforms that provide customers a compelling, easy-to-use experience for evaluating Astera Labs silicon in their target applications

  • Include customer-relevant interfaces, connectors, and configurations that match real deployment scenarios (OSFP, QSFP-DD, PCIe/CXL slots, network interfaces)

  • Develop evaluation platform documentation including user guides, quick-start instructions, test procedures, and application examples

  • Support customer evaluation activities — providing technical guidance, interpreting results, and facilitating customer design-in decisions

Rack-Scale Product Design

• Chassis & System-Level Design:

  • Lead the hardware design of rack-scale products including AI chassis-class systems, switch trays, CEM cards, and integrated connectivity platforms

  • Own system-level architecture decisions — including backplane/midplane topology, slot configurations, power distribution architecture, cooling strategy, and management interfaces

  • Design high-density backplane/midplane PCBs with high-speed interconnect routing supporting 112G/224G PAM4 signaling

  • Drive power distribution design for rack-scale systems — including AC/DC conversion, point-of-load regulation, power sequencing, hot-swap protection, and power budgeting

  • Design BMC/management subsystems for chassis products — including platform monitoring, thermal management, fault detection, and remote management interfaces

• Mechanical & Thermal Design:

  • Direct mechanical engineering for rack-scale products — chassis sheet metal, card cages, cable management, hot-swap mechanisms, rack mounting, and serviceability

  • Drive thermal/airflow architecture for chassis systems — including fan tray design, airflow optimization, thermal sensor placement, and thermal throttling strategies

  • Evaluate and integrate liquid cooling solutions for high-power-density rack-scale AI infrastructure applications

  • Ensure mechanical designs comply with relevant rack standards (OCP, Open19, EIA-310) and customer-specific mechanical requirements

• ODM Collaboration:

  • Partner with ODM manufacturers in Asia for chassis and system-level products — providing design specifications, reviewing ODM designs, and driving joint development

  • Manage technical ODM relationships for rack-scale products, navigating the differences from traditional CM engagement models

  • Conduct design reviews of ODM-proposed solutions, ensuring alignment with Astera Labs' performance, quality, and reliability requirements

  • Leverage proximity in Taiwan to maintain close, high-cadence collaboration with ODM engineering teams

Hardware Validation (Platform & Rack-Scale)

• Define and execute validation strategies for silicon evaluation platforms and rack-scale products — ensuring comprehensive coverage across electrical performance, signal integrity, power delivery, thermal behavior, mechanical integrity, and environmental reliability

• Establish validation methodologies specific to evaluation platforms — including silicon interface verification, channel characterization correlation, power delivery accuracy, and instrumentation validation

• Drive rack-scale product validation including system-level thermal testing, power stress testing, mechanical shock/vibration, EMC/EMI compliance, and safety certification

• Support interoperability testing between rack-scale products and the broader ecosystem of host platforms, NICs, switches, and cables

• Build validation infrastructure in Taiwan that enables local execution of the majority of validation activities without dependency on Santa Clara labs

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• With Santa Clara HQ:

  • Maintain tight alignment with the Senior Director of Hardware Design Engineering and peer engineering leaders on technology roadmap, design standards, and resource priorities

  • Collaborate with AEC/SCM hardware design teams to ensure consistency in design methodologies, component strategies, and validation approaches

  • Partner with Signal Integrity engineering on channel modeling, simulation-to-measurement correlation, and design rule development

  • Coordinate with Firmware Engineering on hardware-firmware co-design for evaluation platforms and rack-scale products (power sequencing, BMC, CMIS, diagnostics)

• With Manufacturing & NPI:

  • Partner with Manufacturing Engineering and NPI teams to ensure silicon platforms and rack-scale products are manufacturable, testable, and scalable

  • Leverage Taiwan proximity to CM/ODM sites to drive efficient DFM/DFA reviews, pilot builds, and production ramp support

  • Participate in make-vs-buy decisions for rack-scale products — evaluating internal design vs. ODM engagement for each product

• With Product Management & Sales:

  • Align silicon platform and rack-scale product development priorities with product management roadmap and customer demand

  • Partner with Sales and FAE teams to prioritize OEM engagements and allocate customer hardware engineering resources

  • Provide technical input for customer proposals, RFQ responses, and competitive evaluations

  • Represent hardware engineering in customer-facing executive discussions and technical reviews

Lab Infrastructure (Taiwan)

• Define and build the Taiwan lab environment to support:

  • Silicon evaluation platform bring-up and characterization (high-speed oscilloscopes, BER testers, VNAs, power analyzers)

  • Rack-scale system test (power load testing, thermal chambers, airflow measurement, EMC pre-compliance)

  • Customer demonstration and interoperability testing

  • OEM customer joint debug sessions

• Drive capital equipment planning and procurement for the Taiwan lab

• Ensure lab capabilities enable the Taiwan team to operate with high autonomy while maintaining measurement correlation with Santa Clara labs

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Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related technical discipline

• 15+ years of progressive experience in hardware design engineering for high-speed interconnect, server/switch systems, silicon evaluation platforms, or data center infrastructure products

• 5+ years in engineering management/leadership roles, including building and leading multi-team hardware engineering organizations

• Proven track record designing complex high-speed PCBs at 56G/112G PAM4 data rates or above — including evaluation boards, system boards, or backplane/midplane designs

• Demonstrated experience engaging with OEM customers on hardware design enablement, design reviews, and technical support for silicon/ASIC integration

• Strong background in silicon evaluation platform (EVB/SVB) design — enabling bring-up, characterization, and customer evaluation of complex semiconductor products

• Experience with rack-scale or chassis-class system design — including power distribution, thermal management, backplane design, and mechanical packaging

• Deep understanding of signal integrity, power delivery network design, thermal management, and high-speed PCB design best practices

• Proven ability to build engineering teams and establish new engineering site operations

• Experience working with ODM partners and contract manufacturers in Asia

• Excellent communication skills in both English and Mandarin (or other relevant Asian languages)

• Based in Taiwan (Hsinchu or Taipei area) with willingness to travel across Asia (China, Japan, Korea) and to US headquarters regularly

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's or Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with emphasis on high-speed digital design, signal integrity, or power electronics

• Direct experience designing evaluation platforms for retimer, re-driver, PCIe switch, CXL switch, or high-speed SerDes silicon

• Experience developing rack-scale products for hyperscale cloud customers (AWS, Google, Microsoft, Meta) or AI infrastructure applications

• Track record at a leading semiconductor company, system OEM, or ODM in a customer-facing hardware engineering leadership role

• Experience with 224G/lane interconnect technology and next-generation substrate/connector architectures

• Deep familiarity with relevant standards: IEEE 802.3ck/dj, OIF CEI-112G/224G, PCIe 5.0/6.0, CXL 2.0/3.0, SFF-TA (OSFP, QSFP-DD), CMIS, OCP specifications

• Experience with server/switch platform design including BMC subsystems, IPMI/Redfish management interfaces, and platform initialization

• Background in establishing and scaling engineering operations in Taiwan for US-headquartered semiconductor or systems companies

• Experience with EDA tools (Cadence Allegro/OrCAD, Ansys HFSS/SIwave, Keysight ADS, SolidWorks/Creo)

• Mandarin Chinese fluency (native or near-native) for customer and partner engagement in Greater China

• Japanese or Korean language proficiency for OEM engagement in Japan/Korea

• Relationships with key OEM hardware engineering organizations in Asia