# Performance Engineer at Astera

> United States · Unspecified · Software engineering · open. Source: https://alderhq.app/jobs/greenhouse%3Aasteralabs%3A4718443005 (read 2026-11-07).

## Facts (observed)

- Company: [Astera](https://alderhq.app/companies/astera)
- Location text: San Jose, California, United States; San Jose
- Where it can be done from (inferred): United States (evidence: "Location: San Jose, California, United States; San Jose")
- Posted: 2026-07-24 (105 days ago)
- First seen by alder: 2026-11-02 · last verified: 2026-11-04
- Reposted: 0 times · edited: 0 times
- Apply on the employer's site: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/asteralabs/jobs/4718443005

## Pay and sponsorship

- Posted pay: not posted
- Market band for similar posted roles (SF Bay Area, n 1752): p25 $161k, median $200k, p75 $239k
- H-1B filings at this company for similar roles, FY26: 1 ([US DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/performance))

## Description (the employer's text)

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 www.asteralabs.com.

Senior Performance Engineer

Location: San Jose, CA (On-site)

Role Overview

Astera Labs is a hyper-growth connectivity company enabling the rack-scale AI infrastructure powering the world's most advanced GPU clusters. Our Scorpio scale-up fabric switches are purpose-built to unlock the performance of next-generation AI workloads, and we're looking for a Senior Performance Engineer to demonstrate the real-world value of our silicon where it matters most: on real inference and training workloads running on GPUs at scale.

In this role, you will define how the world measures scale-up fabric performance. You'll build the roofline models, benchmarks, and end-to-end workload studies that quantify our performance leadership, expose bottlenecks, and drive performance fine-tuning of real AI workloads on our fabric to inform product direction. Your data will directly shape architecture, firmware, and product decisions — and fuel the marketing narrative that positions Astera Labs at the center of AI connectivity.

Key Responsibilities

- Performance Characterization & Benchmarking
- Establish theoretical and measured roofline models for Astera Labs' scale-up fabric across key performance metrics, defining the reference for all comparative testing.
- Build and maintain baseline performance benchmarks using industry-standard tools such as NVBandwidth and NCCL across a range of GPU configurations and switch topologies.
- Quantify the impact of differentiated Astera Labs AI fabric features (e.g., Hypercast, In-Network Computing) against baselines using both synthetic benchmarks and real inference workloads.
- Real Workload Analysis & Fabric Scalability
- Run end-to-end inference model workloads on target hardware to capture real-world performance beyond synthetic benchmarks, supporting architecture decisions and customer-facing demonstrations.
- Evaluate fabric performance as inference cluster size scales from 16 to 32 GPUs and beyond, identifying bottlenecks and building performance scaling models for state-of-the-art AI workloads.
- Design and execute head-to-head performance comparisons against competing fabric switch solutions to produce data-driven differentiation evidence.
- Test Infrastructure & Automation
- Design, build, and maintain automated lab infrastructure including test execution pipelines, traffic generation tooling, and data collection and reporting systems.
- Enable repeatable, high-quality, and scalable performance measurements across all hardware configurations, reducing manual effort and accelerating the test cycle.
- Share infrastructure and playbooks with the Product Applications team to accelerate customer application development and issue resolution.
- Cross-Functional Impact & Innovation
- Partner closely with ASIC architecture, firmware, software, Product Definition, Product Applications, and Product Marketing teams to communicate findings, influence design decisions, and resolve performance-impacting issues.
- Serve as a key technical resource in the early evaluation of new fabric architectures, interconnect technologies (UALink, PCIe Gen 6/Gen 7, Ethernet, UEC), and AI/ML communication paradigms.
- Provide performance data, analysis, and live benchmark support for key customer engagements and industry events; produce clear, audience-appropriate performance reports, technical briefs, and marketing collateral, and maintain living documentation in Confluence.

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Data: alder (https://alderhq.app). Cite https://alderhq.app/jobs/greenhouse%3Aasteralabs%3A4718443005 and the date you read it. Observed facts come from the employer's own listing; location reach, level, family and skills are inferences.