Manager, Forward Deployed Creative Technologist

Adobe•San Jose, CA

9d•$147,900 - $293,250•Hybrid

About The Position

Every global brand is now a content factory. They need thousands of on-brand asset variations every quarter — static, video, and increasingly 3D — and they need to ship them in days, not weeks. The customer who figures this out first wins the next decade of marketing. We are the team that gets them there. Forward Deployed Creative Technologists (FDCTs) embed with enterprise customers, learn their content supply chain end-to-end, and craft custom AI-powered creative workflows on top of Adobe Firefly Services and Firefly Creative Production (our node-based workflow builder). We are not pre-sales. We are not consultants. We are technical creators who ship. You will lead a team of FDCTs as a hands-on player-coach. ~50% of your week is in code, in customer rooms, in demos — leading by example, not by directive. The other ~50% is hiring, growing, coaching, and calibrating the bar across the team. You take the hardest customer engagement alongside your ICs. You hire people better than you and the team gets sharper every quarter. This role is for someone who is maniacally focused on customer value and who instinctively builds a team that is too. If your team's customers cannot point to time saved, dollars earned, or campaigns shipped, nothing else matters.

Requirements

8-12 years straddling creative production AND technical building. You have shipped both: real creative work (motion, design, video, 3D, photography, brand systems) AND real technical work (apps, integrations, plugins, automation).
The FDCT bar applies to you — at depth. Production code in the last 6 months. If you've drifted into pure people management, this is not your role.
Management craft, with evidence. You have hired ICs, run PIPs, made promotion calls that stuck, navigated cross-functional conflict, coached someone out, and grown at least 2–3 ICs who are now more senior because of your management. Names, stories, and specific moves on request.
For India M50: Meta-management + cross-geo fluency. You have hired and developed at least 2 managers underneath you. You have recovered from at least one wrong management hire. You have run teams across geos (India + US, ideally EMEA too) and understand the real cost of bad cross-geo coordination.
Creative content supply chain fluency. You understand how briefs become assets, how brand systems and design tokens work, how master files become channel variants, how creative teams hand off through Figma / PSD / INDD to DAM and review-and-approval. You read your team's customer engagements at architect depth.
Firefly Services + Workflow Builder fluency.
Adobe ecosystem depth (AEM, Workfront, Frame.io, App Builder) and Figma plugin / API fluency are strong pluses. You know what the field is hitting before your ICs tell you.
Vibe-coding with judgment. Daily AI-tooling use (Cursor / Claude Code / Copilot). You set the AI-native bar for your team — name the tools you use, the wins, and the things AI got wrong that you caught.
Extreme ownership and a GSD attitude. When the strategic customer's deal is at risk, you don't escalate — you fly in. You own outcomes end-to-end. You ship ugly first and refuse to let process slow you or your team down.
Extreme customer orientation. You hold C-suite rooms. You hear a customer pain and respond with a credible, impact-focused, creative solution — not a science experiment. You translate tech to ROI without losing the engineers in the room.
A great nose for the money. You instinctively connect your team's work to business outcomes the customer's exec sponsor cares about — time-to-activation, cost per variant, brand-compliance pass rate, campaign velocity.
A public portfolio — link or PDF at application. Must show shipped creative AND shipped technical work that you personally did, not just managed. This is a hard requirement; applications without a portfolio will not be reviewed.
High EQ, low ego.
Willingness to travel 15–25%.

Nice To Haves

Out-of-balance managers — either no production code in 18+ months ("pure people managers"), or hiding behind your team's code and not developing them ("I'd rather just code"). The role is 50/50 player-coach.
Senior ICs without management track record. This role requires evidence of hiring, performance management, and growth — not just being a great senior IC.
PMs / program managers / consultants — every leader on this team writes code AND produces creative work themselves.

Responsibilities

Stay hands-on. Code in the last 6 months — and the next 6. You take the hardest customer engagement alongside your team. You write the reference workflow others learn from. You ship.
Hold the room with customers. CMOs, creative directors, heads of IT — and regional execs across geos. You translate tech to ROI and walk away with renewals signed.
Performance-manage honestly. Run real 1:1s. Set explicit expectations. Make the hard calls early — promote, redirect, or coach out — and document them. Distinguish underperformance from wrong-fit.
Grow the team. Every IC who reports to you should be more capable in 12 months than they were when they joined. Name the specific move you made. If you can't, you're not managing — you're directing.
Calibrate the bar. Across customers, across engagements, across the FDCT bench. The work should look the same whether you wrote it or one of your ICs did.
Build the playbook. Reusable patterns from your team's engagements become shared repo templates, workflow templates, or upstream workflow nodes. The next pod moves faster because of what your pod learned.
Manage vendors and contractors where applicable — calibrate vendor quality, raise the bar when contractor pass-rates slip, rotate out when needed.
Feed Adobe product and engineering. Bring real field signal back. Influence what gets built next based on what your team is actually hitting.