Dir, Software Development

Adobe•San Jose, CA

2d•$186,500 - $358,250

About The Position

Our Company Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We give everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. We’re passionate about empowering people to create beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, and transform how companies interact with customers across every screen. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours. The Challenge Adobe Developer Platforms has the mission to help Developers “write better software, faster.” Our goal is to provide integrated experiences for technical folks, to streamline the tasks of building, testing, deploying and operating services at scale. We strive to build into all our product offerings strong defaults around security, cost efficiency, reliability and operational observability, to minimize the cognitive load and toil needed to effectively build and run services at web scale. We build platforms and work to deliver them as an integrated product to our customers, who come in two main classes: Developers, Site Reliability Engineers, Database Engineers and other technical folks inside Adobe who build our products, our platforms and internal IT systems. Outside Developers and employees at our customer companies, consultancies and independent software vendors, who are building on, extending and integrating with our products to add new capabilities or to solve unique integration challenges. The role For this role, we are looking for an exceptionally strong, hands-on technical leader to own and evolve the Kubernetes Platform for Adobe’s Infrastructure Engineering team. This role demands deep expertise—not surface-level familiarity. You must have a proven track record of operating, scaling, and debugging Kubernetes in production at significant scale. This is a high bar role. We are explicitly looking for candidates who: Have expert-level understanding of Kubernetes internals (scheduler, control plane, networking, storage, autoscaling, etc.) Are deeply experienced with cloud-native and open-source ecosystems, and actively leverage or contribute to them Have production experience with managed Kubernetes platforms such as EKS and AKS, including their limitations and trade-offs Can debug complex, distributed systems issues end-to-end (networking, performance, reliability, scaling bottlenecks) Are capable of designing and implementing novel solutions, not just applying known patterns We seek a self-starter who operates with high ownership and urgency, capable of driving ambiguous, complex infrastructure initiatives to completion. You should be equally comfortable designing large-scale architectures and diving deep into low-level technical problems. You will act as a technical authority across teams—setting direction, making hard architectural calls, and raising the engineering bar. You must be able to influence senior engineers and executives alike, articulating clear, well-reasoned technical strategies. Strong opinions, backed by deep expertise and data, are expected. This is not a delegative leadership role. You will be expected to personally engage in design, implementation, and production operations, and to lead by example through technical depth and execution. This is an operations-heavy environment. Your team owns a critical portion of Adobe’s compute infrastructure, and you must bring extensive experience running high-scale, highly reliable, always-on systems. You should have a strong bias toward automation, resilience, and operational excellence, and be comfortable being accountable for production outcomes. Success in this role requires someone who thrives in complexity, pushes systems beyond their limits, and consistently raises the technical bar for everyone around them.

Requirements

Deep customer empathy for developers, with a strong track record of building platforms that materially improve developer velocity, reliability, and productivity at scale
Expert-level understanding of distributed systems, including consensus, fault tolerance, networking, and data consistency, with deep specialization in Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures
Proven ability to design, build, and operate highly reliable, large-scale, cost-efficient cloud platforms, with clear ownership of production systems under real-world load
Demonstrated expertise in writing and reviewing highly optimized code, and applying advanced architectural patterns for performance, scalability, and efficiency
Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts, trade-offs, and architectural decisions to both engineers and executive stakeholders
12+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with deep, production-grade expertise in Kubernetes (K8s), EKS, AKS, and cloud networking—including debugging and operating these systems at scale
10+ years of engineering leadership experience, with a strong track record of raising the technical bar, mentoring senior engineers, and driving execution on complex, ambiguous initiatives
5+ years leading leaders (manager-of-managers / Director-level scope), with demonstrated ability to scale organizations without compromising on technical excellence
A strong track record of building and retaining high-performing, diverse engineering teams, with uncompromising hiring standards
Strong influence and decision-making ability, capable of driving alignment on contentious technical topics with well-reasoned, data-backed arguments
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience, with a strong foundation in systems, algorithms, and software design

Nice To Haves

Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science (or equivalent), particularly with focus on distributed systems, systems engineering, or related fields

Responsibilities

Lead the Kubernetes Platform team. This team manages hundreds of K8s clusters across multiple cloud providers and Adobe-managed data centers.
Act as a liaison to client and partner engineering teams to share the Infrastructure Engineering mission, vision and roadmap
Gather input on client needs and proposed integration points with technical services which are delivered by our partner organizations
Inspire and encourage our internal customer teams to contribute to the kubernetes platform via an internal open source and open contribution model
Review and provide feedback on features, technology, architecture, designs, time & budget estimates, and test strategies
Manage projects risks & engage in creative problem solving
Develop and evolve engineering and business processes to optimize team efficiency
Partner with other teams across Adobe on achieving common goals