Forward Deployed Architect

Adobe•San Jose, CA

32d•Hybrid

About The Position

You will be joining the newly formed Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE) team within Adobe’s Digital Experience organization. As part of a key innovation initiative, our mandate is to bridge the gap between product engineering and real-world implementation. We are a team of world-class engineers dedicated to solving the most complex challenges for the world's largest companies, ensuring they extract maximum value from the Adobe ecosystem. This is an opportunity to serve as a Strategic Technical Authority and architect the future of Adobe’s product capabilities from the front lines. You will not just integrate existing software; you will architect and build new, production-grade product features that solve the most complex challenges for global industry leaders. As a Forward Deployment Architect, you will treat customer environments as the ultimate proving ground, identifying gaps in high-scale scenarios and engineering solutions that push the boundaries of what our platform can do. You will act as the vital link between real-world requirements and Core Engineering, ensuring that the innovations you build today become the foundational standards of the Adobe ecosystem tomorrow.

Requirements

12+ years of technical experience, with at least 5 years in a Solution or Systems Architecture role, preferably designing large-scale SaaS or enterprise software solutions.
Mastery of the Java/JVM ecosystem and modern application frameworks (e.g., Spring Boot), with the ability to evaluate and select technology stacks based on long-term maintainability and performance trade-offs.
Deep expertise in Distributed System Design, including microservices, Event-Driven Architectures (EDA), and complex API integration patterns (REST, GraphQL, gRPC).
Advanced proficiency in Data Architecture, capable of designing high-throughput persistence layers and defining data models across Relational, NoSQL, and Search platforms (e.g., Elasticsearch).
Strong command of Cloud-Native principles and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) within major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
Executive presence and communication skills: The ability to translate complex technical concepts into business value for C-level executives and non-technical stakeholders.
A strategic mindset for Security and Compliance, ensuring architectures adhere to SOC2, GDPR, and enterprise-grade security standards from day one.

Nice To Haves

Technical Thought Leadership: A history of public technical communication, including speaking at major industry conferences, publishing technical white papers, or maintaining a widely-read engineering blog.
Experience with the Adobe Ecosystem: Prior experience architecting solutions involving Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, or Adobe Experience Platform (AEP).
Big Data & Streaming Architectures: proven ability to design real-time data ingestion and processing pipelines using technologies like Apache Kafka, Spark, Flink, or Databricks.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency in defining infrastructure standards using Terraform, Ansible, or Helm, enabling reproducible and scalable deployments.
AdTech/MarTech Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with Digital Marketing concepts such as Real-Time Bidding (RTB), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), or personalization engines.
Legacy Modernization: A track record of successfully migrating monolithic legacy systems to microservices or cloud-native architectures (the "Strangler Fig" pattern).
Open Source Leadership: Active contributions to open-source projects or a history of speaking at technical conferences/meetups.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end technical vision for complex implementation projects, translating ambiguous customer requirements into scalable, secure, and high-performance system architectures.
Establish and enforce design patterns, API specifications, and coding standards to ensure that solutions are not only functional but also maintainable and compliant with enterprise security policies.
Design robust integration strategies between Adobe Experience Cloud and diverse client technology stacks (legacy systems, cloud-native apps, and third-party data platforms), ensuring seamless data flow and interoperability.
Define the strategy for system observability, reliability, and high availability (HA/DR), guiding engineering teams to build "self-healing" and resilient production environments.
Lead high-stakes architectural workshops with client stakeholders (up to C-level) to align technical roadmaps with business objectives and drive consensus on implementation strategies.
Serve as a technical authority and mentor for the wider FDE team, conducting design reviews and fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and best practices.
Partner deeply with Product Management and Core Engineering to feedback field insights into the product roadmap, influencing the future design of Adobe’s platform capabilities.
Build proof-of-concepts (POCs) for novel use cases to de-risk complex technical decisions before wider implementation.