Astera Labs
Senior Principal Engineer, Network Modeling Lead
$205K–$260K
San Jose, California, United States +1 · Principal · Full-time · Posted Jul 30, 2026
- Location
- San Jose, California, United States
California - Experience
- 12+ years of relevant background in network modeling, system architecture, and scaleup fabric benchmarking and analysis.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
About the job
Build and validate performance models of Astera Labs’ Scale-Up fabric to evaluate AI/ML workloads, guide architecture decisions, and identify scalability bottlenecks before silicon tape-out.
What you'll do
- Develop and maintain fabric simulators and analytical models; validate predictions against benchmark and silicon measurements.
- Analyze workload, topology, and cluster-scale performance, including bandwidth, latency, throughput, and congestion.
- Use modeling results to inform architecture, product roadmaps, and fabric feature decisions.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
- Strong programming skills in Python and/or C++.
- Hands-on experience with cycle-approximate or event-driven system modeling and simulation, and deep experience maintaining fabric models.
- Understanding of high-speed interconnect and switching fundamentals, including physical layer and protocols such as PCIe (Gen 6/7), ESUN, UEC or UALink.
Nice to have
- MS or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.
- Familiarity with AI/ML collective communication and large-scale LLM training/inference traffic patterns.
Pay
USD $205,000 to $260,000 base salary
Tools
Python, C++, Astera-Sim, Garnet, NS-3, ATLAHS, BookSim, PCIe (Gen 6/7)
AI focus
Model AI/ML workloads and collective communication patterns, including AllReduce, AllGather, and ReduceScatter, to assess fabric performance and scalability.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative