Design Verification Engineer Intern (Toronto)

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Employment type: Internship

About Astera Labs

Astera Labs develops purpose-built connectivity solutions for rack-scale AI infrastructure. Our Intelligent Connectivity Platform brings together high-performance connectivity technologies for AI, cloud, server, and networking systems.

The role

As a Design Verification Engineer Intern in Toronto, you will help verify complex digital designs for connectivity products. You will contribute to simulation-based verification, create and run tests, analyze waveforms and logs, and help improve functional coverage and reusable verification infrastructure.

This internship is an opportunity to build hands-on experience at the intersection of digital design, computer architecture, verification methodology, and software tooling while taking ownership of meaningful verification work.

What you’ll do

• Develop, modify, and run simulation-based tests for digital design and connectivity IP blocks.

• Contribute to SystemVerilog and UVM-based verification environments, including tests, sequences, agents, scoreboards, monitors, and checkers.

• Run individual tests and regressions, review build and simulation results, and triage failures.

• Debug functional issues by analyzing logs, transactions, register activity, and waveform databases with industry-standard tools.

• Add or update test definitions, regression lists, manifests, and scripts as verification requirements evolve.

• Track functional and code-coverage results and help identify meaningful coverage gaps.

• Work with reusable verification infrastructure, protocol agents, reset and interrupt components, register models, and scoreboards.

• Explore assertions, formal verification, or emulation workflows when appropriate for the design and project.

• Collaborate with design, architecture, emulation, and verification engineers to reproduce issues and communicate findings.

• Document test intent, debug conclusions, verification procedures, and project progress.

What you bring

Basic qualifications

• Currently pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.

• Coursework, project, research, or hands-on experience with digital logic, computer architecture, RTL, or hardware verification.

• Programming or scripting experience in SystemVerilog, Verilog, C/C++, Python, or a comparable language.

• Familiarity with Linux development environments, command-line tools, and Git or another source-control system.

• Strong analytical and debugging skills, with an interest in understanding complex hardware behavior.

• Strong written and verbal communication, organization, and time-management skills.

• A hands-on work ethic, curiosity, learning agility, and ability to take ownership of assigned deliverables.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with SystemVerilog, UVM, constrained-random verification, assertions, or functional coverage.

• Familiarity with simulation, waveform-debug, regression, or coverage tools such as VCS, Verdi, DVE, or equivalent tools.

• Experience writing testbenches, sequences, scoreboards, monitors, checkers, or reference models.

• Exposure to AXI, APB, PCIe®, CXL®, memory systems, fabrics, controllers, or other high-speed digital interfaces.

• Familiarity with formal verification, emulation, RTL simulation, or register-abstraction-layer models.

• Experience using Python, Tcl, or shell scripting to automate verification workflows and analyze results.