Principal Architect, Express AI Foundations

Adobe • San Jose, CA

2d • $206,400 - $379,100

About The Position

The Opportunity Adobe Express enables all users, whether individuals or large organizations, to effortlessly produce impressive content. The AI Foundations team constructs a flexible, scalable AI framework that drives creativity at scale in design, imaging, motion, and personalization. We're looking for a Principal Architect to build and implement the AI framework for Adobe Express, merging strong ML skills with proficiency in distributed systems, data architecture, and large-scale service development. You'll define and invent the end-to-end foundation that brings Agentic AI, Create AI, Imaging AI, Motion AI, and Personalization AI to life — spanning model orchestration, inference systems, data pipelines, caching and storage layers, session analytics, and continuous evaluation frameworks. This role blends applied research and engineering leadership — ideal for someone who can connect modeling innovation with production-grade systems that deliver real-time, customer-facing intelligence at scale.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in large-scale distributed systems AI infrastructure, or ML platform engineering.
• Deep understanding of ML and LLM fundamentals — training, fine-tuning, deployment, and evaluation workflows.
• Proven expertise in building and scaling data pipelines, real-time streaming systems, and event-driven architectures (Kafka, Spark, Flink, etc.).
• Strong background in caching strategies, database development, and performance optimization for large-scale serving systems.
• Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks, model routing, and multi-model inference.
• Proficiency in Python, Java, C++, or Go, with an emphasis on distributed systems, cloud-native deployment, and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with Agentic AI patterns — reasoning loops, memory persistence, task decomposition, and multi-agent coordination.
• Skill to merge engineering precision with practical research understanding, connecting prototyping and production.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with experience influencing cross-functional technical direction.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Experience architecting AI assistants, build agents, or multimodal creative systems.
• Exposure to Generative AI (LLMs, diffusion, or multimodal architectures).
• Experience with MLOps pipelines, feature stores, and model registries.
• Track record of open-source contributions, publications, or conference presentations.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the complete AI stack for Adobe Express — covering Agentic AI, Construct AI, Imaging AI, Motion AI, and Personalization AI.
• Develop and operationalize end-to-end systems — integrating microservices, data pipelines, LLM orchestration layers, in-house and third-party models, databases, caches, session analytics, and evaluation systems into a cohesive architecture.
• Develop large-scale data and inference infrastructure to support model training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment — employing Spark, Kafka, Flink, and other distributed frameworks.
• Develop high-performance runtime services for inference and orchestration with strong observability, fault tolerance, and latency guarantees.
• Apply strong caching and storage tactics to enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness for various AI workloads.
• Lead development of experimentation and evaluation systems, encompassing session-level analytics, feedback loops, and quality metrics that drive continuous improvement.
• Work closely with applied research, product, and platform teams to implement LLMs and other AI models into customer-facing services.
• Drive architectural strategy for Express AI Foundations — connecting ML models, reasoning engines, and data streams into adaptive, intelligent systems.
• Mentor senior engineers and scientists, encouraging excellence across architecture, experimentation, and AI system composition.

Benefits

• At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact.
• Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.
• Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.
• At Adobe, you will be immersed in an exceptional work environment that is recognized around the world.
• You will also be surrounded by colleagues who are committed to helping each other grow through our unique Check-In approach where ongoing feedback flows freely.
• If you’re looking to make an impact, Adobe's the place for you.
• Discover what our employees are saying about their career experiences on the Adobe Life blog and explore the meaningful benefits we offer.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees