AE| Principal Product Application Engineer (Scorpio) - San Jose, California, United States
Originally posted 29 September 2026 by the employer.
This role focuses on Scorpio products.
About the role
This role involves providing technical guidance to ODMs to overcome design challenges for semiconductor products for PCIe/CXL, and generating collateral for existing and new products.
What you'll do
- Provide technical guidance to ODMs to overcome design challenges.
- Generate collateral for existing and new products.
- Support the development and designing-in of semiconductor products for PCIe/CXL.
- Own issue resolution, driving internal teams and communicating to customers through FAE and sales teams.
- Support global customer engagement with travel as required for on-site activities, reviews, and system bring-up.
What you'll need
- Bachelor’s in EE.
- Minimum of 10 years’ experience designing in complex SoC/silicon products with a high speed (preferably PCIe) interface.
- Strong working knowledge of PCIe LTSSM at a physical layer level, associated standards, and debug.
- Most recent experience with PCIe 4.0 at a minimum, some experience with 5.0/CXL.
- Silicon/System bring-up and debug experience in customer systems.
- Firsthand experience with lab equipment such as protocol analyzers/exercisers, high-speed oscilloscopes, or BERTs.
- Technical writing skills to generate clear, precise documentation including application notes.
Nice to have
- Master’s in EE.
- Triaging complex customer reported issues which require taking into account multiple layers of conditions; for instance, silicon, firmware, hardware board design, and system environment.
- Development/support for PCIe or Ethernet Switch or Retimer products.
- PCIe compliance testing methodology and troubleshooting.
- Comfort working with software/firmware associated with semiconductor products, such as; Firmware development with C-language, scripting with Python or other equivalent programming languages.
- Understanding of Data Center systems like Servers, JBOGs/JBODs, Networking switches/routers/interconnects etc.
Skills: PCIe, CXL, silicon/system bring-up, customer systems, protocol analyzers
This role has been open 2 days — well below the 53-day median for Applications FAE roles.
Applications FAE · Serdes Highspeed
|
Open roles in category
78
|
Median days open
53 d
|
Median salary
$183k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Astera Labs | All employers we track in this specialty (78 roles · 22 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 15 | 78 |
| Median days open | 47 d | 53 d (−6 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $183k |
Skills observed across this category: PCIe, CXL, silicon/system bring-up, customer systems, protocol analyzers
Who's hiring in this category
- Astera Labs (this employer) · 15 open roles · median 47 d
- Synopsys · 15 open roles · median 16 d
- Qualcomm · 7 open roles · median 76 d
- Keysight Technologies · 6 open roles · median 34 d
- Microchip Technology · 4 open roles · median 47 d
- Broadcom · 3 open roles · median 51 d
How we counted: 78 open Applications FAE (Serdes Highspeed) roles from 22 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 1 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there. Figures refresh nightly.