Director, Product Line Management - Custom Silicon - San Jose, California, United States
$185,000 - $210,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 14 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This senior individual contributor role leads strategic customer engagements for Astera Labs' Custom Solutions business. The role focuses on custom silicon opportunities, partnering directly with hyperscalers, AI labs, and emerging AI infrastructure companies to guide programs from concept through production.
What you'll do
- Own product and business strategy for Astera Labs’ Custom Solutions portfolio.
- Build trusted relationships with hyperscalers, AI infrastructure providers, AI labs, and other strategic customers.
- Understand customer architectures and translate technical and business requirements into custom silicon solutions.
- Define solution roadmaps, product strategies, and customer engagement models for custom silicon programs.
- Lead customer roadmap discussions, executive business reviews, and technical strategy sessions.
- Develop business cases, commercial frameworks, pricing strategies, and lifecycle plans for custom engagements.
What you'll need
- BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
- 12+ years of experience in semiconductor product management, product line management, technical marketing, applications engineering, business development, or a similar customer-facing technical leadership role.
- Experience leading custom silicon or advanced semiconductor products from concept through production.
- Strong understanding of semiconductor architectures and AI infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, or memory technologies.
- Experience working directly with hyperscalers, AI companies, cloud service providers, or major system OEMs.
- Demonstrated success developing custom silicon opportunities and securing semiconductor design wins.
Nice to have
- Experience with custom ASICs, AI accelerators, networking silicon, storage silicon, memory silicon, SmartNICs, DPUs, XPUs, or other custom infrastructure silicon.
- Knowledge of chiplet architectures, HBM, advanced packaging, heterogeneous computing, and high-performance semiconductor design.
- Experience developing customer-facing technical collateral and strategic messaging.
- Experience developing commercial structures, pricing strategies, and business cases for semiconductor programs.
- MBA or advanced engineering degree.
Skills: Principal Product Applications Engineer, technical bridge, customer-facing, custom silicon programs, high-speed interconnect technologies, silicon bring-up, post-silicon validation
This role has been open 44 days — below the 52-day median for Applications FAE roles.
Applications FAE · Serdes Highspeed
|
Open roles in category
78
|
Median days open
52 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 · 23 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 15 | 78 |
| Median days open | 49 d | 52 d (−3 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $183k |
Skills observed across this category: Principal Product Applications Engineer, technical bridge, customer-facing, custom silicon programs, high-speed interconnect technologies, silicon bring-up, post-silicon validation
Who's hiring in this category
- Astera Labs (this employer) · 15 open roles · median 49 d
- Synopsys · 14 open roles · median 13 d
- Qualcomm · 7 open roles · median 73 d
- Keysight Technologies · 6 open roles · median 31 d
- Broadcom · 4 open roles · median 59 d
- Microchip Technology · 4 open roles · median 44 d
How we counted: 78 open Applications FAE (Serdes Highspeed) roles from 23 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 28 Sept 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.