Optical FW​/SW Engineer – Tech Lead

Astera Labs (NASDAQ: ALAB) provides rack-scale AI infrastructure through purpose-built connectivity solutions. By collaborating with hyperscalers and ecosystem partners, Astera Labs enables organizations to unlock the full potential of modern AI. Astera Labs' Intelligent Connectivity Platform integrates CXL®, Ethernet, NVLink, PCIe®, and UALink™ semiconductor-based technologies with the company's COSMOS software suite to unify diverse components into cohesive, flexible systems that deliver end-to-end scale-up, and scale-out connectivity.

The company's custom connectivity solutions business complements its standards-based portfolio, enabling customers to deploy tailored architectures to meet their unique infrastructure requirements. Discover more at

We are looking for an Optical FW/SW Engineer, Tech Lead for design, development, and validation of embedded firmware and supporting software for Astera Labs' next-generation optical products. You will build software for optical engines, optical modules, and emerging near-packaged optics (NPO) and co-packaged optics (CPO) solutions, spanning real-time control, calibration, telemetry, diagnostics, and high-speed link optimization.

This role sits at the intersection of embedded systems, optics, and hardware. You will own critical technical problems from architecture through silicon and hardware bring-up to production readiness, partnering with optical, electrical, DSP, systems, and manufacturing teams. Your work will help enable reliable, scalable connectivity for rack-scale AI infrastructure as Astera Labs advances the transition to higher-bandwidth optical interconnects.

• Optical Firmware Architecture and Development
  • 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.
• Optical Control and Performance Optimization
  • Develop control algorithms for modulator operation, automatic power control, temperature compensation, calibration, and link adaptation.
  • Implement telemetry, diagnostics, monitoring, and fault-handling features that improve optical-link health, reliability, and serviceability.
  • Optimize firmware for latency, power efficiency, control stability, and performance across evolving optical architectures.
• Hardware Bring-Up, Product Validation, and Quality
  • Lead firmware and hardware bring-up, including board initialization, peripheral integration, lab debugging, and root-cause analysis.
  • Integrate firmware with photodetectors, TIAs, ADCs, DACs, sensors, drivers, DSPs, and hardware control interfaces such as I2C and SPI.
  • Partner with optical, electrical, DSP, systems, and validation teams to characterize, tune, and qualify optical products.
  • Establish unit-testing strategies and maintain automated tests that improve firmware quality, coverage, and release confidence.
  • Apply disciplined version-control, code-review, documentation, and release practices throughout the development lifecycle.

• 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.

• Experience with optical module management, CMIS, telemetry, diagnostics, or control requirements.
• Experience with optical engines, pluggable optics, silicon photonics, PIC/EIC…