Principal Scientist - Firefly Enterprise
Adobe · Posted Oct 15
Creative software, document productivity, and digital marketing solutions
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About the role
Firefly Enterprise brings Adobe's generative AI and creative technology into the heart of enterprise content production, helping large organizations create, adapt, and deliver on-brand content at production scale inside the tools their teams already use. The charter spans two areas: an Audio/Video media-processing backbone for enterprise-scale content production, and an Extensibility platform of enterprise agentic workflows and plug-ins that surface Firefly's capabilities inside Figma and other Adobe creative applications. This Principal Scientist acts as the technical anchor and player-coach for a small, fast-growing team, owning architecture, raising the engineering bar, mentoring software and machine-learning engineers, and shaping the roadmap with customers and adjacent teams.
What you will do
- Set the long-term technical architecture and vision across both charter areas.
- Make enterprise-scale reliability and resiliency a first-class property of everything the team ships.
- Bring AI capabilities into the product and into how the team builds, raising both customer value and engineering velocity.
- Grow a scaling team of software and machine-learning engineers through hands-on work and mentorship, i.e., lifting the technical bar by example.
- Turn customer and field insight into a credible, deliverable roadmap in partnership with adjacent teams.
- Own the architecture for enterprise-scale audio/video media-processing pipelines by designing for throughput, latency, cost, and operational resilience at production volume.
- Architect the extensibility platform: agentic enterprise workflows and plug-ins that expose Firefly's enterprise capabilities inside Figma and other Adobe creative apps.
- Stay hands-on by writing code, leading design and architecture reviews, and setting the engineering standards the team builds to.
- Mentor developers and specialists in machine learning alike, growing their technical judgment through the work.
- Play an instrumental role in hiring: interview, calibrate, and keep the bar high.
- Interface directly with customers and field/sales teams to identify real problems and collaborate across adjacent teams to shape the roadmap and deliver solutions.
- Manage collaborators and expectations across engineering, product, and the field; with clarity and follow-through.
- Leverage AI capabilities to improve both what customers get and how the team develops software.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 15+ years building large-scale distributed software systems.
- Proven experience operating at enterprise scale with a deep focus on reliability and resiliency.
- Strong backend engineering in Java, Python, or comparable technologies, with a solid command of distributed systems and cloud-native platforms.
- Experience with at least one of the team's two domains, and the ability to ramp on the other:
- Media processing: audio/video pipelines, transcoding, streaming, or large-scale media workflows.
- Extensibility: SDKs, plug-in architectures, integration frameworks, or agentic systems.
- A track record of mentoring both software engineers and machine-learning engineers and raising the technical bar across a team.
- Comfort working directly with customers and field/sales teams to translate problems into solutions.
- Strong collaborator management with the ability to set expectations and align across engineering, product, and the field.
- Excellent communication and the ability to make complex architecture legible to engineers, product leaders, and executives.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience employing AI capabilities for both customer-facing value and internal product development.
- Familiarity with LLM application architectures, RAG, AI orchestration frameworks, MCP, or agentic systems.
- Experience building integrations or plug-ins for Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, or comparable creative ecosystems.
- Depth in enterprise-scale media processing, namely, codecs, streaming infrastructure, or GPU-accelerated media pipelines.
- Familiarity with enterprise identity, security, governance, and compliance frameworks.
- Contributions to open-source software or widely adopted developer platforms.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Adobe
Adobe Inc. is a global software company widely known for its creative, publishing, and document productivity tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat. The company operates major cloud platforms—Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Experience Cloud—serving individual creators, small businesses, and large enterprises worldwide. Adobe has increasingly integrated powerful generative AI capabilities like Adobe Firefly and Acrobat AI Assistant into its product ecosystem.
- Industry
- Software
- Company size
- 31360+ employees
- Founded
- 1982-12-01
- Location
- San Jose, California, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company
- 1985-01-01Series A
Leadership
Chair and Chief Executive Officer
Steven Day
Interim Chief Financial Officer
President, Creativity and Productivity Business
President, Customer Experience Orchestration Business
Chief People Officer and Executive Vice President, Employee Experience
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