Senior Software Development Engineer

Adobe•San Jose, CA

18h•$139,000 - $257,550

About The Position

Our Company 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 aim to hire top talent and are dedicated to building outstanding employee experiences where respect and equal opportunity are priorities. We believe fresh ideas can emerge from any part of the organization, and yours could be the next breakthrough. The Opportunity Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) drives personalized, real-time customer interactions at a large scale. Our Engineers develop high-performance, scalable services together with tools supporting global brands in engaging with millions of users across every touchpoint. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer — a uniquely hybrid role that sits at the intersection of deep technical engineering and direct customer engagement. This is not a traditional backend engineering role. The ideal candidate is equally at home debugging issues and presenting architectural issue, root cause and potential solutions to customers. Acting as a link between customers and engineering teams, you will understand customer use of AJO in production. You will detect problems before they escalate and partner with engineers to solve them. You will also support internal development by building tools and services to improve product quality and efficiency.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science or related field, with 7+ years of experience building backend services, distributed systems, and microservice architectures.
Strong experience with Java/Scala, RESTful APIs, NoSQL datastores, and streaming technologies like Kafka.
Solid understanding of modern engineering practices: microservices, CI/CD, Kubernetes, observability.
Proven ability to write efficient, robust, high-quality code and troubleshoot complex distributed systems.
Outstanding verbal and written communication abilities — capable of adjusting tone from highly technical to executive-level without sacrificing accuracy.
Demonstrated experience presenting to senior technical collaborators or enterprise customers — comfortable owning the room and driving clarity from complexity.
Strong attentive listening skills — capable of understanding what a customer truly requires, beyond just their stated needs.
Ability to translate customer feedback into engineering requirements — structured, reproducible, and actionable for engineering teams.
High empathy for customers combined with honest, grounded technical judgment — you advocate for customers without overpromising.
Comfortable operating in a role that spans customer-facing and engineering-facing work — you switch contexts fluidly and bring the right approach to each.
Proactive and driven — you identify problems before they intensify and see them through to resolution.
Collaborative across functions — you work effectively with engineering, product, support, and account teams.
Growth mindset — you are as interested in improving the product as you are in resolving individual issues.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to AI/LLM concepts or practical experience integrating AI into production systems (a strong plus).
Knowledge of GenAI frameworks/APIs (e.g., OpenAI, LangChain, HuggingFace) or enthusiasm to learn and implement them.
Experience in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions engineering, technical account management, or senior support engineering is a significant plus.

Responsibilities

Meet directly with enterprise customers to gain insight into their use cases, integration patterns, and the challenges they encounter running AJO in production.
Present technical recommendations and architectural guidance to customer engineering teams and executive collaborators — clearly, confidently, and in the customer's language.
Diagnose and resolve customer-facing issues by combining deep product knowledge, hands-on investigation, and close collaboration with internal engineering teams.
Act as a reliable technical consultant for high-value customers — spotting risks before they intensify, bringing up ways to improve their AJO implementation, and developing long-term confidence in the platform.
Understand the customer use case landscape across segments and industries — building a working knowledge of how different types of organizations use AJO and what they need most.
Bring structured customer feedback back to engineering — not as a list of complaints, but as articulate, reproducible problem sets with context, frequency, and customer impact clearly framed.
Work with product and engineering teams to prioritize and resolve issues surfaced through customer engagement, acting as the voice of the customer in internal discussions.
Proactively identify patterns across customer issues and feedback — surfacing systemic product gaps, documentation shortfalls, or configuration anti-patterns that affect multiple customers.
Eradicate internal problem sets by driving root cause analysis, coordinating multi-functional resolution, and ensuring issues are closed — not just triaged.
Design, build, test, and deploy microservices and backend systems that power intelligent, customer-centric features at scale.
Develop and incorporate AI/LLM agents and tools that elevate product quality, boost operational efficiency, and proactively address customer issues.
Architect scalable, high-throughput, low-latency services that operate reliably in distributed, multi-region environments.
Prototype ideas powered by AI and explore GenAI frameworks (e.g., OpenAI, LangChain) to find opportunities to apply them meaningfully across the platform.
Implement monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection to ensure the highest production quality and system reliability.
Contribute to code reviews, testing, documentation, and CI/CD pipelines to uphold engineering excellence across the team.