Staff Applied Scientist, 3D - Firefly Foundry

Adobe•San Jose, CA

About The Position

Firefly Foundry is Adobe’s enterprise managed-service offering for custom multi-modal generative AI — deep-tuned image, video, and 3D models built on each customer’s IP, paired with creative production workflows and a media-intelligence layer, and deployed across new and existing Adobe surfaces. The business has gained significant traction in Media & Entertainment, marketing, and consumer retail, and is expanding rapidly into adjacent verticals. We are especially looking for candidates experienced in large-scale, industry-level pre-training and mid-training of multi-modality generative models with the focus on dynamic, physically accurate 3D worlds. This role has a direct impact on the quality of Adobe’s generation models, supporting next-generation creative workflows for millions of users. As a Staff Applied Scientist at Adobe, you will join a world-class team of applied researchers and engineers building the future of digital experiences — innovating across the full training stack, collaborating across data, modeling, and product, and shipping your work to customers worldwide.

Requirements

Ph.D. or MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Graphics or a related field, with 8+ years industry experience.
Extensive practical experience in large-scale generative AI training with a focus on image and video generation and editing.
Experience with diffusion models, transformers, or other state-of-the-art generative architectures.
Strong working knowledge of 3D content systems, including meshes, materials, textures, scene structure, cameras, lighting, coordinate systems, skeletal animation, and motion workflows.
Strong coding and prototyping skills in Python, PyTorch, and ML infrastructure tools.
Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate across cross-functional teams.
Experience working with product teams on technology transfers.
Strong publication record in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related fields.

Nice To Haves

Experience on large-scale generative model training
Experience on synthetic data generation
Experience of working with large-scale datasets
Experience of working with product teams on technology transfers

Responsibilities

Build novel generative models and pipelines to support mesh generation, physically based material generation and texture generation, scene reconstruction, lighting estimation, animation, and simulation for mediate & entertainment use cases as well as high-fidelity product imagery.
Build agentic workflows that use AI systems to create, manipulate, repair, annotate, evaluate, and refine 3D and 4D content.
Develop large-scale synthetic data pipelines that involve game and rendering engines, digital environments, 3D geometry, physically-based materials, lighting, animation, and simulation.
Develop, implement, and rigorously evaluate advanced techniques for conditional generation and editing — with emphasis on improving instruction compliance, controllability, and visual quality in pre-trained models.
Collaborate cross-functionally with researchers, engineers, and product teams to translate multimodal innovations into scalable downstream applications within Adobe products.
Develop and maintain robust evaluation pipelines to assess generative models across quality, efficiency, robustness, and safety metrics.
Translate research concepts and published work into production-ready implementations using Python and modern ML frameworks.