Tech Lead Automation Engineer

Astera Labs•San Jose, CA

9d•$135,000 - $170,000

About The Position

Astera Labs is seeking a hands-on Tech Lead Automation Engineer with a passion for infrastructure and SG&A automation. This role involves leading the development of internal platforms to accelerate company operations. The engineer will own systems that automate access, tracking, and administrative workflows across engineering and business functions, making decisions on development, contributing significantly to building, and setting technical direction. This is a builder's role requiring coding, schema design, and feature shipping, utilizing AI coding platforms as core tools.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science with 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of a production web application, including backend (Python; FastAPI or similar), relational database design (PostgreSQL, SQL, schema migrations), and frontend work.
Experience integrating with enterprise SaaS APIs (e.g. Atlassian suite, Microsoft 365, GitHub/Bitbucket) and cloud infrastructure APIs (compute/storage, job schedulers).
Working knowledge of identity and access management (RBAC, SSO/OAuth2, and group provisioning via a directory service (LDAP or equivalent)).
Experience designing systems of record or inventory/asset-tracking tools, and the dashboards that surface their data.
Fluency with AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) as part of a daily development workflow.
A strong bias toward automating manual, cross-functional processes, and comfort scoping those flows directly with non-technical stakeholders (IT, HR, Finance).
A track record as a hands-on technical lead who owns architecture decisions and personally builds a significant portion of the system.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to licensing, entitlement, or lifecycle-tracking systems (software licenses, IP/asset lifecycle, or similar compliance-adjacent tracking) is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Take technical ownership of internal automation platforms end-to-end, including architecture, data model, background sync/scheduling, and roadmap.
Design and ship full-stack features, including backend services, role-based access control, approval workflows, and frontend UI.
Maintain and extend integrations with external systems such as SaaS tools, cloud infrastructure, and internal directory/identity services.
Design and build new operational systems from the ground up to address emerging business needs, such as systems of record for tracking assets and entitlements, and dashboards for visibility into usage, cost, and status.
Grow existing tooling into fuller self-service products.
Partner with IT, HR, and Finance stakeholders to automate SG&A workflows, including onboarding/offboarding, approval routing, audit logging, and access reviews.
Build identity and access integrations (SSO/OAuth2) and RBAC models that satisfy audit requirements.
Own database schema evolution and maintain automated test coverage.
Use AI coding platforms as a daily force multiplier for scaffolding, testing, and delivery speed.
Set and enforce engineering standards as the codebase scales.