The Role
You are a player-coach who leads a team of Forward Deployed AI Engineers and Creative Pipeline Specialists building GenAI-powered content production systems for the world's largest brands. You don't manage from the sidelines — you write code, review PRs, make architecture calls, and unblock your team by rolling up your sleeves. Your technical credibility is your management tool.
You've been on the other side of the table. You've worked at an agency, a creative studio, or a MarTech company where content gets made at scale — so you understand the customer's world from the inside. Now you're leading the team that transforms those workflows with AI.
Your team is the core of Adobe's Forward Deployed Engineering org. You own delivery outcomes, team performance, and technical quality across multiple customer engagements simultaneously. You build a team that ships fast, operates with high autonomy, and compounds every engagement into reusable capability. You elevate your team through clarity, judgment, and technical depth — not process, not status reports, not overhead.
What You'll Do
- Lead by building. You are hands-on. You contribute directly to production systems — writing code, reviewing architecture, debugging deployments — especially when progress or clarity depends on it. Minimum 30% of your time is technical work.
- Own delivery outcomes. Drive end-to-end delivery across multiple customer engagements. Scope work, sequence delivery, remove blockers early, and make fast trade-offs between speed, scope, and quality. Every engagement ties back to measurable value realization and customer adoption — not just "we shipped it."
- Grow a high-performing team. Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional AI engineers. Set a high bar for performance. Give direct, actionable feedback. Build a culture of ownership, speed, and trust — not a culture of meetings and approvals.
- Set technical direction. Guide architecture decisions, enforce engineering standards, and ensure your team builds scalable, reusable systems — not throwaway consulting artifacts. You define what "production-ready" means.
- Drive the product feedback loop. Turn field-proven patterns into actionable product roadmap input. You sit at the intersection of customer reality and product strategy, and you make sure what your team learns in the field reaches the people building the product.
- Scale the org, not just the headcount. Codify what works into playbooks, shared tooling, and reusable frameworks. Build internal capabilities that make every subsequent engagement faster. You think in leverage, not just delivery.
- Represent the org externally. Showcase your team's work at customer workshops, internal reviews, and industry forums. Publish, speak, and build the reputation of FDE as a world-class engineering org — both for Adobe's brand and to attract the best talent.
What You Bring
- You still write code. You write and review production-grade code (Python, TypeScript/Node.js, React, or equivalent). You can debug a deployment, review a PR with real feedback, and make targeted IC contributions when the team needs it. You haven't "graduated" from engineering — you lead from within it.
- Engineering management track record. 3+ years managing high-performing engineering teams (8+ total years in software engineering). You've hired strong engineers, grown careers, managed performance, and built teams that ship. You've led through ambiguity and delivered under pressure.
- Hands-on GenAI experience. You've built or deployed AI-powered systems — LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, or equivalent. You understand how model behavior shapes product experience. You can make informed architecture decisions about when to use agents, when to fine-tune, when to prompt-engineer, and when to build something entirely different.
- AI-native operator. You use Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or equivalent daily. You've built or extended MCP servers, experimented with agentic workflows, or automated your own team's processes with AI. You push your team to work this way too.
- Creative content supply chain experience. You've built content production systems, MarTech platforms, asset automation tools, or creative workflow technology — ideally at an ad agency, creative studio, or marketing technology company (e.g., Monks, Publicis, R/GA, Accenture Song, WPP, or similar). You know how creative teams work, how content gets produced at scale, and what breaks in the process. This is what makes you different from a generic engineering manager.
- Customer-facing leadership. You've worked directly with enterprise customers — running technical workshops, presenting to stakeholders, embedding with client teams. You earn trust with both the VP of Creative and the lead engineer. Up to 30% travel to customer sites.
- Startup speed, enterprise judgment. You've operated in fast-moving environments where you had to figure things out without a playbook. You make fast, sound decisions under pressure. You simplify complexity instead of adding process.
What Sets You Apart
- Former technical founder, technical director at an agency, or early engineer at a startup who's built a product from scratch
- You've built AI-powered creative production or content automation systems (asset generation, creative workflow orchestration, template-based production at scale)
- You've managed globally distributed teams and know how to build cohesion across time zones
- You use AI agents to drive your own management workflows — scheduling, prioritization, tracking, reporting
- You've introduced engineering practices (CI/CD, DORA metrics, code quality standards) into organizations that didn't have them
About Adobe
Adobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s industry-leading offerings including Adobe Acrobat Studio, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, and GenStudio enable people and businesses to turn ideas into impact, powered by AI and driven by human ingenuity.
Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours.
** Let’s Adobe together**
At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.
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