Director of Engineering, Graph

Adobe•San Jose, CA

11d

About The Position

We’re building Graph, a node-based creative platform that is simultaneously a powerful developer infrastructure and a creator-facing product. This is a foundational leadership role for someone who can architect systems, inspire teams, and ship things that matter. Graph is not a feature, it’s an operating system for creative expression. A unified node-based execution layer that powers generative AI workflows, orchestrates multimodal media pipelines, and gives creators and developers a composable, programmable canvas. As Director of Engineering, you will own the technical execution of this system: from the real-time interactive graph editor used by creators, to the distributed execution engine that powers APIs, automations, and product surfaces underneath. You’ll partner directly with Product, Design and Architecture, and scale a high-performing team while staying hands-on enough to shape key technical decisions.

Requirements

12+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles - managing teams, running programs, and owning hiring
People development, career conversations, performance management, and team morale
Proven experience building complex platforms or developer-facing systems at scale
Track record shipping interactive products, creative tools, IDEs, design systems, or similar
Strong background in building distributed systems
Technically literate enough to understand platform architecture, hold engineers accountable, and represent technical trade-offs upward
Comfortable working in a system where architectural authority sits with a Principal Engineer
Operates at both strategy and execution levels, capable of writing a technical brief and unblocking an engineer in the same day, whenever required
Strong instincts for user workflows and product experience, not just systems architecture
Translates ambiguity into clear technical direction with minimal hand-holding
Experienced cross-functional partner for Product, Design, Customers and executive stakeholders

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with distributed systems, APIs, or creative tooling is a plus
Experience with node-based systems (visual programming, shader graphs, NLE timelines, etc.)
Background in creative tools, imaging, design, video, audio, or 3D
Experience building extensible platforms or developer ecosystems
Familiarity with agentic systems or workflow automation frameworks
Open source contributions or community-facing platform work

Responsibilities

Lead engineering team for building Graph as both a creator-facing application (visual workflow builder) and a platform layer (execution engine + APIs powering multiple product surfaces).
Partner with Product and Design to define interaction models, primitives, and UX paradigms.
Work closely with the architect for the node-based execution engine (real-time + async), stateful workflow composition and persistence, and graph execution across heterogeneous systems: GenAI services, media processing, and external APIs.
Ensure a shared execution layer across all surfaces.
Integrate first- and third-party GenAI models into graph nodes.
Build abstractions for prompting, chaining, and multi-step pipelines.
Enable reusable, composable “capsule” nodes for multimodal inputs and outputs across text, image, video, 3D and audio.
Build and lead a high-performing team across frontend, backend, and platform.
Drive execution across multiple workstreams with clear ownership and accountability.
Establish strong engineering practices around code quality, testing, reliability, and dev velocity.
Design Graph as a platform for internal and external developers.
Enable third-party integrations, custom node creation, and API-first access to workflows.
Define clear contracts between the platform and product layers.