Product Quality Engineer, New College Graduate (NCG)
Location: San Jose, California — Headquarters
Employment type: Full-time
Function: Product Quality
About Astera Labs
Astera Labs builds connectivity solutions that help enable rack-scale AI infrastructure. Our early-career engineers work on meaningful projects alongside experienced technical teams, gaining hands-on experience, mentorship, and opportunities to contribute to products that move from development into the market.
About the role
As a Product Quality Engineer, New College Graduate, you will develop practical product-quality expertise across customer returns, failure investigation, interface compliance, firmware qualification, laboratory measurements, and production readiness. You will partner with Product Quality, Electrical Validation, Product Engineering, Firmware, Field Applications, and manufacturing teams to turn data into clear diagnoses, corrective actions, and reliable evidence.
This role is based at Astera Labs' San Jose headquarters and is designed for a recent graduate who wants to build a career at the intersection of hardware, systems, validation, and quality engineering.
What you'll do
- Learn and progressively own routine RMA and quality investigations from intake through disposition and closure, maintaining complete evidence and communication traceability.
- Perform or support visual inspection, serialization, ESD-safe handling, functional checks, configuration reviews, log analysis, link-state checks, error-counter collection, and known-good comparisons.
- Use structured problem-solving methods to distinguish facts, hypotheses, root cause, containment, corrective action, preventive action, and effectiveness verification.
- Support PCIe, Ethernet, or CXL TX/RX compliance work by learning the applicable specification, method of implementation, DUT topology, fixtures, approved software, equipment, limits, and evidence requirements.
- Execute or review bounded compliance-test activities and preserve setup conditions, equipment and software versions, raw waveforms or logs, results, deviations, and approvals.
- Support firmware qualification activities, including regression, stress, interoperability, defect retest, upgrade and downgrade testing, power-cycle and boot-slot checks, telemetry, production-test compatibility, release notes, and known issues.
- Develop safe, repeatable use of assigned laboratory equipment such as DC supplies, DMMs, oscilloscopes, VNAs, BERT/BER equipment, and thermal equipment.
- Maintain clear Jira QC and FA Tracker updates and contribute to 4D/8D reports, corrective-action records, and evidence packages.
- Support Electrical Validation compliance requests, firmware qualification reviews, production-readiness evidence, open-item tracking, and requirements-traceability closure.
- Communicate findings, risks, anomalies, open actions, and next steps clearly to cross-functional partners.
- Help improve quality workflows through practical tools such as checklists, decision trees, instrument checklists, and data-capture templates.
What you bring
- Recent completion of, or progress toward, a technical degree or equivalent hands-on project experience in electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, materials science, quality engineering, or a related discipline.
- Foundational understanding of electronics, hardware systems, debugging, testing, or failure analysis.
- Strong curiosity about high-speed interfaces, including PCIe, Ethernet, or CXL, and an eagerness to learn how hardware, firmware, systems, and customer environments interact.
- A careful, data-driven approach to investigation and documentation.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical findings to cross-functional audiences.
- Willingness to work hands-on in a laboratory environment and follow ESD, grounding, current-limiting, cabling, calibration, PPE, emergency, and data-capture requirements.
- Ability to manage priorities, ask questions early, escalate gaps or failed tests appropriately, and follow through on open actions.
Helpful experience
- Laboratory, capstone, research, internship, or project experience with oscilloscopes, VNAs, BERT/BER equipment, power supplies, DMMs, thermal equipment, or similar tools.
- Exposure to hardware bring-up, link training, LTSSM, BER testing, signal-quality measurements, jitter, equalization, receiver tolerance, eye or bathtub metrics, or interoperability testing.
- Experience with firmware releases, regression testing, logs, telemetry, production test, or release-readiness reviews.
- Familiarity with Jira, failure-analysis tracking, 4D/8D, CAPA, CAR/SCAR, MRB, or other structured quality processes.
Compensation
Salary range is $140,000 to $155,000 depending on experience, level, and business need. This role may be eligible for discretionary bonus, incentives and benefits.
Why join us
You'll build a strong technical foundation through real investigations, supervised lab work, cross-functional collaboration, and increasing ownership. Over time, you'll be able to take a routine quality case from intake to closure, present an evidence-backed diagnosis, support interface-compliance and firmware-readiness work, and improve the systems that help Astera Labs deliver reliable products.
We know that creativity and innovation happen more often when teams include diverse ideas, backgrounds, and experiences, and we actively encourage everyone with relevant experience to apply, including people of color, LGBTQ+ and non-binary people, veterans, parents, and individuals with disabilities.
