Manager, Firefly FDE
Adobe · Posted Oct 27
Creative software, document productivity, and digital marketing solutions
Get a personal compatibility score
Add a resume for personal matches
About the role
The Forward Deployed AI Engineering team partners with global brands and agencies to transform end-to-end creative workflows—from ideation through activation—unlocking the GenAI-powered Content Supply Chain. The work centers on generative AI, Adobe Firefly and GenStudio, cloud delivery, and enterprise integration patterns. This role leads, mentors, and grows a team of Forward Deployed AI Engineers who prototype, build, and launch GenAI-powered solutions and products directly with customers, while also acting as a hands-on engineer and technical sponsor on strategic engagements.
What you will do
- Recruit, coach, and empower a high-performing team of Forward Deployed AI Engineers (and select Forward Deployed AI Architects).
- Act as both mentor and peer-level engineer—reviewing code, shaping architectures, and guiding engineers on technical depth, delivery velocity, and customer impact.
- Cultivate a culture of engineering excellence, experimentation, and AI tinkering, ensuring the team stays at the frontier of generative AI and enterprise delivery.
- Develop future leaders by strengthening technical judgment, customer-facing confidence, and multi-functional influence.
- Sponsor and engage directly in strategic customer programs. Roll up your sleeves to build, prototype, and launch solutions and products with your engineers when customer concerns or critical achievements arise.
- Ensure your teams apply Forward Deployed Engineering principles: embedded collaboration, rapid prototyping, iterative feedback, and production-grade handoffs.
- Serve as the point of contact for technical and delivery challenges, balancing innovation with governance, reliability, and scale when addressing blocking issues.
- Champion delivery excellence—every engagement must tie back to measurable value realization and customer adoption.
- Define and enforce engineering standards across pods, including CI/CD pipelines, reusable frameworks, architecture playbooks, and model governance practices.
- Partner with Directors of Forward Deployed Engineering and Architecture to align technical approaches across the org and codify patterns into scalable, reusable assets.
- Funnel field-proven innovations and standards into Adobe Firefly and GenStudio roadmaps—ensuring product strategy is shaped by customer reality.
- Stay at the forefront of generative AI, creative automation, and enterprise integration—keeping your teams current and inspired.
- Foster internal knowledge sharing—publishing playbooks, reusable modules, and lessons learned that accelerate the entire organization.
- Represent your team in customer workshops, internal reviews, and external forums, showcasing the engineering craft and thought leadership of the FDE org.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Technical Credibility – 8+ years of software engineering, AI/ML, or technical consulting experience, with recent hands-on development in full-stack, cloud, and GenAI applications. You can dive into code, architecture, or delivery sprints when needed.
- People Leadership – More than 3 years in managing people or leading technical teams. Experienced in mentoring, coaching, and developing engineers and architects into highly capable technical and customer-facing talent.
- GenAI Mastery – Direct experience with modern AI technologies, including LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Llama, Mistral), diffusion models (Firefly, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E), RAG pipelines, vector databases, and agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen).
- Adobe Platform Fluency – Strong working knowledge of Adobe Firefly APIs, Creative Cloud SDKs, GenStudio for Performance Marketing, and enterprise integration patterns.
- DevOps & Delivery Excellence – Expertise in cloud deployments (AWS, Azure), CI/CD, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and enterprise-grade delivery with governance, security, and monitoring.
- Customer-Facing Leadership – Track record of engaging directly with enterprise customers, simplifying technical complexity, and earning trust as both an engineer and a strategic partner.
- Culture Builder – Ability to cultivate a high-performance, customer-obsessed culture grounded in engineering excellence, continuous learning, and open collaboration.
- Startup DNA – Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments; relentless about finding faster, better, more innovative ways to deliver impact for customers and scale patterns across the org.
- Flexibility & Presence – Adaptable and energized by balancing hands-on engineering with people leadership. Willingness to travel up to 30% to support customers and teams in person.
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
Recent coverage
Adobe Newsroom
Adobe and NVIDIA Expand Collaboration to Speed Agentic Creation2026-10-15
Adobe Newsroom
Adobe and Heathrow Airport Partner to Transform the Digital Experience for Millions of Passengers in the AI Era2026-10-08
Adobe Newsroom
Adobe Reports Record Q3 Results2026-09-10
Adobe Newsroom
Adobe Announces Anil Chakravarthy to Become President and CEO and Shantanu Narayen to Become Executive Chair on December 1, 20262026-09-03