Optical FW/SW Engineer – Tech Lead - San Jose, California, United States
$160,000 - $200,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 21 August 2026 by the employer — open 19 days.
About the role
This role involves the design, development, and validation of embedded firmware and supporting software for Astera Labs’ optical products. Your work will focus on optical engines, optical modules, and emerging near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions.
What you'll do
- Architect, develop, optimize, and maintain production-quality embedded firmware for optical engines, PIC/EIC platforms, and optical modules.
- Implement software in C on embedded processors using bare-metal or RTOS-based designs.
- Develop Python scripts and tools for unit-testing, configuration, automation, characterization, manufacturing test, and data analysis.
- Develop control algorithms for modulator operation, automatic power control, temperature compensation, calibration, and link adaptation.
- Implement telemetry, diagnostics, monitoring, and fault-handling features.
- Lead firmware and hardware bring-up, including board initialization, peripheral integration, lab debugging, and root-cause analysis.
What you'll need
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or a related technical field.
- 5–8 years of experience developing embedded firmware or software for optical, photonics, communications, semiconductor, or other high-reliability products.
- Strong programming skills in C and Python, with experience developing software for microcontroller platforms.
- Experience with RTOS-based embedded development, embedded programming methods, hardware interfaces, and low-level device control.
- Proven experience with unit testing, version control, debugging, and hardware bring-up.
- Ability to analyze and resolve complex problems across firmware, hardware, optical control algorithms, and system-level behavior.
Nice to have
- Experience with optical module management, CMIS, telemetry, diagnostics, or control requirements.
- Experience with optical engines, pluggable optics, silicon photonics, PIC/EIC integration, NPO, or CPO.
- Knowledge of lasers, modulators, photodetectors, TIAs, thermal tuning, wavelength control, calibration, and high-speed optical link behavior.
- Familiarity with JTAG, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, optical test equipment, and protocol analyzers.
This role has been open 19 days — well below the 55-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
690
|
Median days open
55 d
|
Median salary
$176k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Astera Labs | All employers we track in this specialty (690 roles · 79 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 4 | 690 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 18 | 5650 · 142 employers |
| Median days open | 37 d | 55 d (−18 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $176k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 113 open roles · median 57 d
- NVIDIA · 59 open roles · median 51 d
- Micron Technology · 57 open roles · median 76 d
- AMD · 44 open roles · median 37 d
- Lattice Semiconductor · 43 open roles · median 3 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 28 open roles · median 77 d
How we counted: 690 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 79 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 10 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 — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.