Principal Forward Deployed Creative Technologist

Adobe•San Jose, CA

9d•$190,200 - $360,500•Remote

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. The base FDCT bench gets them there. The Principal FDCT sets the bar. You are the technical and creative anchor of the FDE org. You take the hardest customer engagements — the Fortune 100 brand with the impossible timeline, the strategic account where the CMO's job depends on the outcome, the messy enterprise stack where nothing works the way the docs say. You walk into the C-suite room and customers stop second-guessing the timeline. You mentor the rest of the FDCT bench and the team gets sharper around you. You have a name in this space. You've spoken at Adobe MAX, written the book, shipped the indie tool, or have a brand/VFX reel that headlines its own conference. When customers Google you, they find proof. This role is for someone who is maniacally focused on customer value, who has the rare combination of deep creative craft AND production engineering chops AND C-suite presence — and who has earned the public profile to prove it.

Requirements

12+ years straddling creative production AND technical building.
Recognized creative work (motion, video, design, 3D, VFX, brand systems, post-production) AND named technical artifacts (indie tool, plugin ecosystem, published architecture, shipped product).
At scale.
Public proof, multiple forms.
Application requires a public portfolio (link or PDF) showing shipped creative AND shipped technical artifacts.
PLUS at least one named-reputation marker: Adobe MAX / NAB / SIGGRAPH / Cannes Lions / peer-tier conference speaker
Book or major-publication authorship
Widely-recognized brand campaign or VFX / post-production credit (your name on the work)
Industry award (Webby, Emmy, Cynopsis, VES, etc.)
Indie tool or plugin with shipped user base in the tens of thousands+
Patent in applied creative AI / pipeline / workflow (publicly visible)
Vision-setting track record. You have set technical or creative direction in a prior role — not just executed someone else's spec. You can point to "before me / after me" change you drove.
Creative content supply chain fluency at architect depth. Brand systems, design tokens, master-to-variant pipelines, brand-compliance gates, agency-to-brand handoff, DAM / Workfront / Frame.io chains. You debug a fractured creative-ops setup faster than the customer's CTO.
Firefly Services + Workflow Builder mastery. Plus Adobe ecosystem depth (AEM, Workfront, Frame.io, App Builder) and Figma plugin / API fluency. You know what's possible, what's painful, what's a year out — and you ramp on adjacent surfaces in days.
Vibe-coding with judgment at scale. You use Cursor / Claude Code / Copilot daily. You spot bad AI output instantly. Your prompts are the ones the rest of the team copies.
Production code that holds up under load.
Extreme ownership and a GSD attitude — at a scope where the FDCT bench, the customer's exec team, and Adobe product leadership all look to you. The hardest call lands on your desk, and you make it.
Extreme customer orientation + C-suite presence. You hold the room with C-suite stakeholders. Translate tech to business value in a way that closes deals and renews them. Credible, impact-focused, creative solutions — never a science experiment.
A great nose for the money. You instinctively see the multi-million-dollar lever inside a fuzzy customer brief, and you architect for it.
A passion for coding and tinkering — ComfyUI, n8n, LangGraph, custom node ecosystems. You explore the frontier so the rest of the team can use what works.
Mentor instinct. You make others around you better. You can pair with a P40 in the morning and pitch to a Fortune 100 CMO in the afternoon, and both walk away saying it was the best hour of their week.
High EQ, low ego.
Willingness to travel 20–30%.

Nice To Haves

Single-track careers — software-engineering-only without creative depth, OR creative-direction-only without shipping engineering. We need both at architect depth.
"Thought leaders" without shipped work. Every line on your resume must come with an artifact.
ML / AI researchers — chasing frontier-model R&D, not customer outcomes.
Senior ICs who have never set direction. If you have only executed someone else's spec for 15 years, the title fits but the role doesn't.

Responsibilities

Own the hardest engagements. The strategic top-tier customer where the FDE motion has to land. The first engagement in a new vertical. The multi-year arc that defines the FDE org's reputation. You go in first; the bench follows.
Set the technical bar. Architectural decisions, technology choices, reusable patterns — your call. Defend it when challenged. Adjust it when the field proves you wrong.
Hold the C-suite room. CMOs, CIOs, CTOs, agency leadership. Translate complex AI and content-supply-chain ideas into something a board chair signs off on. Bring deals home; bring renewals home.
Mentor and grow the FDCT bench. Lift the average. Make the P40 hire you onboard land their first customer faster than the last one. Run live working sessions, code reviews, and internal masterclasses.
Translate customer brief → working workflow at the depth and ambiguity level that breaks others. Firefly Services APIs, Workflow Builder nodes, custom plugins, Figma integrations, multi-system orchestration. Show the rest of the team what good looks like.
Be the public face. Speak at Adobe MAX. Write on the Adobe Blog. Host live demos at customer advisory boards. Represent the FDE org externally and attract talent through your reputation.
Influence Adobe's product roadmap. Bring real field signal into product, engineering, and research conversations. Make the hard call about what gets built next. Demo your work yourself — script, produce, edit. The demos you create become the org's reference demos.