Platform Applications Engineer Intern (8-month Co-Op)

At Astera Labs, we design cutting-edge connectivity solutions that power the world’s largest cloud service providers, server, and networking OEMs. As a Platform Application Engineer Intern, you’ll play a pivotal role in building and supporting the platforms that enable these products to thrive in real-world deployments through.

You’ll create and maintain tools that make our products seamless to integrate, highly debuggable, and delightful to use for both customers and internal engineering teams. Your work will span software, systems, and silicon – developing automation, diving into labs with state-of-the-art equipment, and collaborating closely with customers to solve the toughest technical challenges. Beyond execution, you’ll influence product direction by driving innovation, providing feedback to design teams, and streamlining validation and deployment processes.

This is a high-impact, hands-on role at the intersection of hardware and software, where curiosity, creativity, and technical depth come together to define the next generation of datacenter infrastructure.

Basic Qualifications 

• Pursuing a Bachelor’s degree or higher in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science


• Experience in software development with C, C++, C#, and/or Python.


• Entrepreneurial mindset with a customer-first attitude and a bias toward action


• Excellent written and oral communication

Required Experience  

• Comfort working with software/firmware associated with semiconductor products, such as; Firmware development with C-language, scripting with Python or other equivalent programming languages.


• Hands-on experience building, configuring, and troubleshooting computer systems, with a fundamental understanding of core components such as CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage, motherboards, PCIe devices, and how these components interact at the platform level.

Preferred experience 

• Firsthand experience with lab equipment such as protocol analyzers/exercisers, high-speed oscilloscopes, or BERTs.


• Triaging complex customer reported issues which require taking into account multiple layers of conditions; for instance, silicon, firmware, hardware board design, and system environment. 


• Development/support for PCIe or Ethernet Switch or Retimer products. 


• PCIe compliance testing methodology and troubleshooting. 


• Understanding of Data Center systems like Servers, JBOGs/JBODs, Networking switches/routers/interconnects etc.