Senior Applied Scientist

Adobe • San Jose, CA

13d

About The Position

Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We give everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences! We’re passionate about empowering people to create beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, and transform how companies interact with customers across every screen. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours! Adobe Firefly’s Applied Science & Machine Learning (ASML) group is looking for a senior applied scientist and data leader with a strong research and engineering background to drive the next generation of data systems powering our multimodal and editing foundation models. We seek candidates with deep expertise in dataset strategy, synthetic data pipelines, and model-based data ablations & evaluation , along with experience leading complex cross-functional projects across research and product teams. As an Applied Scientist lead at Adobe, you will join an outstanding team of applied researchers building the future of creativity and digital experiences. You will lead efforts that define, build, and optimize the data that powers Firefly’s generative and editing models , directly influencing model quality, scalability, and differentiation across Adobe’s ecosystem.

Requirements

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field.
• Strong track record of applied research and publications in generative AI, multimodal learning, or data-centric ML.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch , and modern ML infrastructure (distributed training, large-scale data systems, cloud pipelines).
• Proven ability to lead complex technical projects across multiple teams, from prototype to scalable deployment.
• Deep understanding of generative models (diffusion, transformers, autoregressive/flow) and data-driven model optimization .
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience influencing technical direction across stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Experience shipping editing-aware models (inpainting, segmentation, compositing, control signals).
• Expertise in data quality modeling , including weak supervision, active learning, and learned quality/relevance scorers.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale multimodal datasets and synthetic data generation pipelines .
• Demonstrated success driving data and model research initiatives from concept to production impact.

Responsibilities

• Drive data strategy for foundation models: Lead strategy and execution of large-scale multimodal data pipelines (image/video/text/edits), including acquisition, curation, filtering, and synthetic data generation at production scale.
• Develop models for data quality and evaluation: Strategize, train, and evaluate classifiers, scorers, and multimodal evaluators (e.g., VLM-as-judge) to measure, rank, filter, and route data for generative and editing tasks.
• Advance MLLM & Editing FMs: Research, train, and evaluate MLLMs and editing-oriented foundation models that enable creative generation, transformation, and in-product editing workflows.
• Lead cross-functional research projects: Partner with product, infra, and applied science teams to align data-centric modeling strategies with Firefly’s model roadmap and evaluation frameworks.
• Innovate, mentor, and influence: Survey and translate frontier research into production systems, mentor junior scientists and engineers, and contribute thought leadership in multimodal data and generative modeling.

What This Job Offers

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