Principal Architect — Adobe Stock

Adobe•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Adobe Stock provides millions of customers with access to high-quality creative content coordinated across Adobe’s products and workflows. As content creation, discovery, licensing, and consumption evolve through generative and agentic AI, our architecture must enable new customer experiences while maintaining performance, reliability, security, governance, and trust. We are seeking a Principal Architect to serve as the architectural authority for Adobe Stock. This role owns end-to-end architecture, guides the development of critical features and services, and translates strategic objectives into coherent, scalable, and achievable technical plans. Success demands outstanding technical judgment, skill in resolving complex disagreements across teams, and a demonstrated record of converting business objectives into production-grade systems and adopted architectural standards.

Requirements

20 or more years of experience in software engineering and platform architecture.
Expertise in distributed systems, networked and event-driven architectures, APIs, frontend architecture, data platforms, cloud-native technologies, and systems integration.
Experience designing systems for demanding performance, scalability, reliability, security, privacy, observability, and operational-efficiency requirements.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex decisions and tradeoffs to technical and nontechnical audiences.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, engineering, or a related technical field.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting content platforms, digital-asset systems, marketplaces, search and discovery systems, or large-scale media-processing workflows.
Experience in developing Agentic AI systems and solutions
Experience working in highly matrixed, enterprise-scale environments
Advanced degree (M.S. or Ph.D.) in Computer Science or related field

Responsibilities

Set long-term architectural and technology direction in alignment with Adobe’s product, technical, and business strategy.
Assess the architectural feasibility of strategic objectives, identifying dependencies, risks, tradeoffs, investment needs, and viable paths to execution.
Lead the architecture of large-scale systems supporting content search, discovery, delivery, licensing, generative AI, agentic workflows, and customer experiences.
Shape the integration of AI-native and agentic capabilities into production workflows.
Establish architectural patterns and standards for APIs, microservices, frontend architecture, event-driven systems, data platforms, and cross-product integrations.
Identify systemic technical risks and architectural gaps, then work with leaders to establish practical mitigation plans.
Communicate Stock’s architectural direction, decisions, risks, and investment needs to senior executives and other key participants.
Mentor architects and technical leads, strengthening systems thinking, technical judgment, and communication.