Field Applications Engineer Intern

Location: San Jose, California
Employment type: U.S. internship
Work arrangement: Fully in-office

About the role

As a Field Applications Engineer Intern, you will help customers and partners implement Astera Labs integrated-circuit and hardware products in real systems. You will work alongside field applications, product applications, hardware, software, validation, quality, sales, and operations teams to understand system requirements, support design-in activities, and help investigate and resolve technical issues.

This is a hands-on opportunity to build experience across customer engineering, system-level debugging, technical communication, and product development. You will contribute to meaningful work with visible product or business impact, receive mentorship, and communicate your results to technical stakeholders.

What you’ll do

• Learn Astera Labs products, software, and solutions and apply that knowledge to customer architectures and system requirements, including performance, workloads, software, power, thermal, and mechanical considerations.

• Support customer design-in activities, including product demonstrations, technical presentations, technical Q&A, and delivery of product and design documentation.

• Participate in customer schematic, board-layout, architecture, and system-design reviews.

• Help reproduce and understand implementation issues using system hardware details, logs, firmware and software information, operating-system details, tests, and results.

• Collaborate with product applications and other internal engineering teams to investigate issues, develop actionable solutions, and communicate next steps.

• Document customer information, debugging progress, test results, feedback, and resolution plans in Jira or related support systems.

• Assist with lab-based testing, software/firmware regressions, interoperability testing, data analysis, and technical collateral as aligned with team priorities.

• Contribute to customer-specific technical task forces and support issue transitions to the appropriate applications, engineering, or quality teams.

• Prepare clear documentation and a final presentation that explain your approach, findings, impact, and learning.

What you bring

• Current enrollment in a bachelor’s or master’s program in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, or a related technical field.

• Strong technical fundamentals and evidence of applying them through coursework, laboratory work, research, internships, co-ops, senior design, hackathons, or personal projects.

• Interest in hardware/software systems, computer architecture, embedded systems, networking, high-performance computing, AI infrastructure, or related interconnect technologies such as PCIe or Ethernet.

• Ability to build, test, debug, analyze, and explain technical work—not simply list tools or technologies.

• Familiarity with programming or scripting, especially Python; experience with C/C++ or MATLAB is useful depending on the project.

• Systematic problem-solving skills, curiosity, attention to detail, ownership, and willingness to learn quickly.

• Clear written and verbal communication and comfort collaborating across hardware, software, validation, architecture, applications, quality, and customer teams.

• Interest in understanding customer requirements and connecting technical details to system-level outcomes.

We value the quality, ownership, and impact of your work more than a particular school, course title, or tool list. If you meet many of the qualifications but not every item, we encourage you to apply.

Internship experience and compensation

This is a paid, hourly U.S. internship. The applicable hourly rate is determined as part of the offer process and specified in the offer letter, depending on education level ranges form $35/hour to $55/hour. U.S. interns currently receive a $500-per-week housing/relocation stipend for the duration of the internship. Interns participate in Early Career programming, including technical and professional-development sessions, community events, and an end-of-program project presentation.

Inclusive workplace

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.