The Role and Its Impact

Our firmware team develops the embedded firmware that brings Astera Labs' compute connectivity silicon to life, from boot and initialization through link management, telemetry, error handling, and diagnostics. This firmware runs on the embedded processors inside our chips and ships in data centers powering AI infrastructure around the world. Beyond the firmware, the team also develops the COSMOS SDK, the software layer customers and internal teams use to configure, monitor, update, and debug our devices in their systems.

We are looking for an experienced firmware engineer who enjoys working close to the hardware, owns features end to end, and is equally comfortable in a pre-silicon emulation environment and in the lab with real silicon. You understand the whole system, not just the chip: how our devices behave inside customer platforms, and how a customer requirement turns into firmware and SDK. You'll work alongside architects, design and verification engineers, validation teams, and our global firmware teams to take new products from early pre-silicon development through bring-up and into customer deployment.

What You'll Be Doing

• Having fun! by being part of a very strong and cohesive group.

• Design, implement, and maintain real-time embedded firmware in C for high-performance connectivity

• Develop low-level drivers, initialization flows, interrupt handling, and control logic for complex hardware blocks

• Bring up and debug firmware in pre-silicon environments (emulation) ahead of tape-out, and on silicon after it arrives

• Work closely with architecture, design, and verification teams to define HW/FW interfaces and to resolve issues across the hardware/software boundary

• Triage and resolve firmware issues reported by validation, product applications, and customers

• Take part in design reviews and code reviews, and help improve our firmware quality, tooling, and development practices

• Develop and extend the company SDK, including APIs, device management, firmware update, telemetry, and diagnostics capabilities, and keep it aligned with firmware features

• Support customer requests and engagements together with product applications and field teams, analyze system-level use cases, and adjust firmware and SDK development to meet customer needs

• Collaborate with firmware teams across sites to deliver features on schedule

What We're Looking For

Required:

• BSc/MSc in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field

• 10+ years of hands-on experience as a firmware engineer

• Proven experience in embedded and real-time firmware development

• Strong programming skills in C on resource-constrained, bare-metal, or RTOS-based systems

• Solid understanding of processor architecture, memory-mapped registers, interrupts, and HW/SW interaction

• Strong debugging skills on real hardware using JTAG debuggers, logs, and register-level analysis

• Broad system-level understanding of how silicon, firmware, SDK, host software, and platform interact, with the ability to turn customer requirements into technical solutions

• A team player with excellent communication skills who works well in a collaborative, cross-site environment

• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership in a fast-moving, high-growth company

Advantage:

• Experience with pre-silicon emulation platforms such as Cadence Palladium or Synopsys ZeBu

• Knowledge of PCIe (link training, enumeration, configuration space, error handling)

• Experience developing SDKs, host-side libraries, or APIs (C/C++ or Python) that interface with embedded firmware

• Experience working directly with customers or supporting customer integration and field issues

• Experience with silicon bring-up of new SoCs

• Python scripting for test automation, debug, or data analysis