About this opportunity
Original employer descriptionPrincipal Scientist: Firefly Enterprise India
The Opportunity
Firefly Enterprise brings Adobe's generative AI and creative technology into the heart of enterprise content production by helping large organizations create, adapt, and deliver on-brand content at production scale, inside the tools their teams already use.
Our charter spans two areas:
- Audio/Video Solutions: The media-processing backbone for enterprise-scale content production: ingesting, transforming, generating, and delivering audio and video reliably at production volume.
- Extensibility: Enterprise agentic workflows and plug-ins that surface Firefly's enterprise capabilities directly inside Figma and other Adobe creative applications.
We're looking for a Principal Scientist to be the technical anchor of a small, fast-growing team; a player-coach who is as comfortable in the architecture and the codebase as in a design review or a customer conversation.
This is a senior individual-contributor role. You won't carry direct reports or own headcount, but you will set the technical direction, raise the engineering bar, and mentor a team of software and machine-learning engineers. You'll partner closely with engineering managers on people leadership, and you'll be instrumental in interviewing and holding the hiring bar high.
Impact You'll Make
- 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.
What You'll Do
- 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.
What You'll Bring
- 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.
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.
Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. Learn more.
Adobe aims to make our Careers website and recruiting process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email [email protected].
AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:
Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.
At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI — and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it’s restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.
