Director, Product Line Management - Custom Silicon
$185,000 - $210,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 14 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves serving as the technical bridge between customers and the engineering organization, supporting custom silicon programs from early architecture discussions through production deployment.
What you'll do
- Serve as the primary technical interface for strategic customer programs.
- Support customer engagements from architecture discussions through silicon bring-up, validation, production, and deployment.
- Lead complex customer debug efforts involving hardware, firmware, software, and system-level integration.
- Translate customer requirements, deployment challenges, and architecture feedback into actionable engineering requirements.
- Develop technical collateral, application notes, reference designs, troubleshooting guides, and customer documentation.
- Develop automation and diagnostic tools using Python or C/C++ to improve engineering efficiency and customer support.
What you'll need
- 10+ years of experience in Product Applications Engineering, Systems Engineering, Customer Engineering, Field Applications Engineering, or a related customer-facing semiconductor role.
- Experience supporting advanced semiconductor or custom silicon products from architecture through production.
- Strong understanding of high-speed interconnect technologies, including Ethernet, PCIe, PAM4, SerDes, DSPs, DAC, AEC, ACC, AOC, and related hardware technologies.
- Experience with silicon bring-up, post-silicon validation, and system-level debugging.
- Strong Linux debugging and troubleshooting experience.
- Experience writing Python or C/C++ scripts for automation, diagnostics, firmware validation, or lab workflows.
Nice to have
- Experience supporting AI infrastructure platforms or high-performance computing systems.
- Familiarity with custom ASIC development and customer-specific silicon solutions.
- Experience with firmware, embedded software, or FPGA validation.
- Understanding of networking, storage, memory, or accelerator architectures.
- Experience creating customer-facing technical documentation, training materials, and application notes.
- Experience supporting executive customer reviews and technical design discussions.
Skills: Principal Product Applications Engineer, technical bridge, customer-facing, custom silicon programs, high-speed interconnect technologies, silicon bring-up, post-silicon validation
More semiconductor jobs: Astera Labs jobs · Field applications engineer jobs · San Jose jobs
First seen in our index 90 days ago, well above the 68-day median for Applications FAE roles.
Applications FAE · Serdes Highspeed
|
Open roles in category
98
|
Median days since first seen
68 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$182k
|
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 (98 roles · 24 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 13 | 98 |
| Median days since first seen | 90 d | 68 d (−22 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | n/a | $182k |
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) · 13 open roles · median 90 d
- Keysight Technologies · 12 open roles · median 48 d
- Synopsys · 12 open roles · median 58 d
- MACOM · 9 open roles · median 16 d
- Qualcomm · 9 open roles · median 73 d
- Microchip Technology · 6 open roles · median 60 d
How we counted: 98 open Applications FAE (Serdes Highspeed) roles from 24 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 13 Nov 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there. Days are counted from when our index first saw each posting, not from the employer's original posting date.