[Hiring] Senior AI Engineering Manager - Forward Deployed @Adobe

Role Description

You are a player-coach who leads a team of Forward Deployed AI Engineers and Creative Pipeline Specialists building GenAI-powered content production systems for the world's largest brands. You don't manage from the sidelines — you write code, review PRs, make architecture calls, and unblock your team by rolling up your sleeves. Your technical credibility is your management tool.

You've been on the other side of the table. You've worked at an agency, a creative studio, or a MarTech company where content gets made at scale — so you understand the customer's world from the inside. Now you're leading the team that transforms those workflows with AI.

Your team is the core of Adobe's Forward Deployed Engineering org. You own delivery outcomes, team performance, and technical quality across multiple customer engagements simultaneously. You build a team that ships fast, operates with high autonomy, and compounds every engagement into reusable capability. You elevate your team through clarity, judgment, and technical depth — not process, not status reports, not overhead.

What You'll Do

• Lead by building: You are hands-on. You contribute directly to production systems — writing code, reviewing architecture, debugging deployments — especially when progress or clarity depends on it. Minimum 30% of your time is technical work.
• Own delivery outcomes: Drive end-to-end delivery across multiple customer engagements. Scope work, sequence delivery, remove blockers early, and make fast trade-offs between speed, scope, and quality. Every engagement ties back to measurable value realization and customer adoption — not just "we shipped it."
• Grow a high-performing team: Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional AI engineers. Set a high bar for performance. Give direct, actionable feedback. Build a culture of ownership, speed, and trust — not a culture of meetings and approvals.
• Set technical direction: Guide architecture decisions, enforce engineering standards, and ensure your team builds scalable, reusable systems — not throwaway consulting artifacts. You define what "production-ready" means.
• Drive the product feedback loop: Turn field-proven patterns into actionable product roadmap input. You sit at the intersection of customer reality and product strategy, and you make sure what your team learns in the field reaches the people building the product.
• Scale the org, not just the headcount: Codify what works into playbooks, shared tooling, and reusable frameworks. Build internal capabilities that make every subsequent engagement faster. You think in leverage, not just delivery.
• Represent the org externally: Showcase your team's work at customer workshops, internal reviews, and industry forums. Publish, speak, and build the reputation of FDE as a world-class engineering org — both for Adobe's brand and to attract the best talent.

Qualifications

• You still write code.
• Engineering management track record: 3+ years managing high-performing engineering teams (8+ total years in software engineering).
• Hands-on GenAI experience: You've built or deployed AI-powered systems — LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, or equivalent.
• AI-native operator: You use Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or equivalent daily.
• Creative content supply chain experience: You've built content production systems, MarTech platforms, asset automation tools, or creative workflow technology.
• Customer-facing leadership: You've worked directly with enterprise customers — running technical workshops, presenting to stakeholders, embedding with client teams.
• Startup speed, enterprise judgment: You've operated in fast-moving environments where you had to figure things out without a playbook.

What Sets You Apart

• Former technical founder, technical director at an agency, or early engineer at a startup who's built a product from scratch.
• You've built AI-powered creative production or content automation systems.
• You've managed globally distributed teams and know how to build cohesion across time zones.
• You use AI agents to drive your own management workflows.
• You've introduced engineering practices into organizations that didn't have them.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits programs.

Company Description

Adobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s industry-leading offerings enable people and businesses to turn ideas into impact, powered by AI and driven by human ingenuity.

Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact.