Principal Quality Engineer

Job Description:

As an Astera Labs Principal Quality Engineer, you will be a technical leader across all aspects of total quality management, including Customer, Supplier, Regulatory, and New Product Development.

Basic qualifications:

• Minimum of a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering while a Master’s degree is preferred.  
• Minimum of 10 years’ experience exercising your general-purpose quality toolkit.

Required experience:

• Excellent communication and soft skills are essential.  You will need to lead cross-functional teams to drive various quality initiatives.  Team members will be highly technical, senior leaders themselves, and you will need to guide the team to the most efficient path to resolution, resolving conflicting engineering judgments and influencing without authority.  You will bring clarity and order to challenging situations, while valuing the time of heavily loaded individuals.
• While daily lab work is not a part of this role, a strong candidate will come from a background of relevant hands-on electrical engineering, such that you will be able to seed the team with fresh technical suggestions in the event of a stall in the problem-solving process.
• Although you don’t need to contribute equally to every role, the ideal candidate has something to offer in all four areas of: 
1. Customer Quality (returns, failure analysis, winning approved vendor status)
2. Supplier Quality (excursion management, audits, continuous improvement)
3. Regulatory (ISO9001, REACH, RoHS, Conflict Minerals, Safety, EMC/EMI)
4. New Product Development (JEDEC/IPC reliability qualification plans, implementing lessons learned, suggesting new best practices). 
• Similarly, the ideal candidate would be able to strengthen quality whether the product is an individual semiconductor device, an electronic assembly (PCB/PCBA, board, hardware), or software/firmware.
• Astera Labs is less than 10 years old and in a steep portion of the growth curve.  Rather than relying on precedent, you will be required to invent and build out new processes and solutions for yourself.  You will more often be in the role of mentor, versus having someone more senior to guide you.
• If you don’t come with experience in PCIe, Ethernet, CXL, high-speed products, then rapid self-study will be expected.
• This role will offer you the responsibility and authority that you’d likely need to be much more senior to acquire within your current company, while simultaneously offering you the kind of hands-on deep technical work that you miss from your more junior days.  If that sounds good to you, come thrive with us!

The base salary range is $160,000 - $240,000. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions.