Engineering Manager, Express AI Foundations
Adobe
San Jose, California
Full-Time
$146,300
RemoteManager
The opportunity
Adobe Express enables everyone — individuals and large organizations alike — to produce impressive content effortlessly. The AI Foundations team builds the flexible, scalable AI framework that powers creativity at scale across design, imaging, motion, and personalization.
We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow a team of engineers building the AI infrastructure for Adobe Express. This role sits at the intersection of technical leadership and people management — you will own the delivery of the AI stack spanning Agentic AI, Imaging AI, Motion AI, and Personalization AI, while developing the engineers who build it. You will partner closely with product, research, and cross-functional engineering teams to shape the technical direction of one of Adobe’s most strategic platforms.
This is an early-level people management role (M30), well suited to someone with a strong engineering foundation who has been leading& managingteams for3–5 years and is looking to deepen their impact through the growth of others and the delivery of high-consequence systems at scale.
Whatyou'lldo
Technical direction and delivery
Own end-to-end delivery of AI infrastructure workstreams — including LLM orchestration, inference services, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks — from planning through production.
Maintain strong enough technical depth toparticipatein system design reviews, challenge architectural decisions, and unblock your team on complex problems.
Work with your team to set and meet engineering quality standards: observability, fault tolerance, latency guarantees, security, and responsible AI practices — including bias awareness and data privacy for AI systems.
Make deliberate, explicit calls on technical debt versus feature velocity, and hold the team accountabletothose decisions.
Develop and communicate a coherent technical roadmap for your area, balancing immediate delivery with sustainable long-term architecture.
Cross-functional partnership
Partner with product management & engineering leadership to decompose high-level product requirements into concrete technical requirements — breaking ambiguous asks into scoped workstreams with clear dependencies, effort estimates, and sequencing.
Drive prioritization across competing demands — balancing new feature work, infrastructure investment, and reliability improvements with a clear, defensible rationale the team and stakeholders can align on.
Collaborate with AI research, data science, and platform teams to integrate in-house and third-party models and APIs into production-quality serving systems.
Represent your team’s work and direction to senior stakeholders — communicating progress, risks, and technical trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Team leadership and people development
Manage and grow a team of 6–10 engineers across varying seniority levels, providing regular coaching, feedback, and career development support.
Drive a strong hiring bar — own the full recruiting lifecycle for your team, from sourcing through offer, and help build an inclusive, high-performing culture.
Foster a collaborative, psychologically safe environment where engineers can do their best work and grow into senior and staff roles.
Whatyou'llbring
3–5 years of engineering management experience, witha track recordof delivering complex infrastructure or platform projects through a team.
A strong technical foundation in distributed systems, AI/ML infrastructure, or large-scale service development — enough to earn credibility with senior engineers and make sound architectural trade-offs.
Experience owning team execution end-to-end — including structured prioritization across competing workstreams, dependency management, and shipping reliably in an agile, fast-moving environment. Can articulate trade-off decisions clearly, not just make them.
Clear, structured communication skills — able to translate technical trade-offs into business terms for PMs and non-technical stakeholders, and to influence direction without authority across teams.
Comfort navigating ambiguity: defining scope, making decisions with incomplete information, and adapting plans quickly as systems and priorities evolve.
Working fluency in modern AI/ML concepts — LLM orchestration, inference infrastructure, prompt engineering, AI output evaluation, and data pipelines — sufficient to guide technical decisions, set a quality bar, and grow team capability.
Demonstrated ability to grow engineers: coaching, setting expectations, giving actionable feedback, and supporting career progression at multiple levels.
Preferred qualifications
Mastersdegree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, ora relatedfield.
Background as a hands-on engineer in data infrastructure, ML platform, or large-scale backend systems before moving into management.
Experience hiring and ramping engineers across a range of seniority levels, including senior and staff engineers.
Exposure to Generative AI development — LLMs, diffusion models, or multimodal systems — either as an individual contributor or as a manager overseeing such work.
Familiarity withMLOpspractices: feature stores, model registries, evaluation pipelines, and deployment workflows.
Actively tracks emerging AI/ML trends and has a considered view onwhat’sapplicable versus overhyped — and can bring that perspective into team planning conversations.
Awareness of security, data privacy, and responsible AI concerns specific to AI-backed systems — including bias, safety, and handling of user data in model pipelines.
Why Adobe
At Adobe, we are crafting the future of creativity through intelligence. The AI Foundations team combines the agility of a startup with the scale and mission of one of the world’s leading software companies. As an Engineering Manager on this team, you will shape the people, systems, and practices that bring adaptive, autonomous, and human-centered AI to millions of creators worldwide — and develop the next generation of engineering talent along the way.
About Adobe
Adobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s industry-leading offerings including Adobe Acrobat Studio, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, and GenStudio 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. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours.
Let’s Adobe together
At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.
Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. Learn more.
Adobe aims to make our Careers website and recruiting process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email accommodations@adobe.com or call +1 408-536-3015.
AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:
Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.
At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI — and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it’s restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.
Expected Pay Range:
Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $146,300 -- $289,900 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process. In California, the pay range for this position is $200,200 - $289,900At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans. Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).
In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.
State-Specific Notices:
California:
Fair Chance Ordinances
Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.
Colorado:
Application Window Notice
If this role is open to hiring in Colorado (as listed on the job posting), the application window will remain open until at least the date and time stated above in Pacific Time, in compliance with Colorado pay transparency regulations. If this role does not have Colorado listed as a hiring location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based on hiring needs.
Massachusetts:
Massachusetts Legal Notice
It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.