Principal Scientist - Firefly Enterprise

Gohyred; Uttar Pradesh; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Adobe seeks a Principal Scientist to serve as the technical anchor for a small, fast-growing team. This senior IC role sets the technical direction, mentors software and ML engineers, and partners with engineering managers on people leadership and hiring standards.

The charter spans Audio/Video Solutions and Extensibility—shipping enterprise-grade pipelines and plug-ins inside Figma and other Adobe creative apps.

Qualifications

• 15+ years building large-scale distributed software systems.
• Experience operating at enterprise scale with reliability and resiliency.
• Strong backend engineering in Java or Python, with distributed systems knowledge.
• Mentoring software and machine-learning engineers and raising the technical bar.
• Ability to engage with customers and field/sales teams to translate problems into solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture for enterprise-scale audio/video pipelines.
• Architect the extensibility platform exposing Firefly capabilities inside Adobe apps.
• Stay hands-on: write code, lead design and architecture reviews, set engineering standards.
• Mentor engineers and ML engineers to grow technical judgment.
• Play an instrumental role in hiring: interview, calibrate, keep the bar high.
• Interface with customers and field teams to shape the roadmap and deliver solutions.
• Leverage AI capabilities to improve product value and engineering speed.

Skills

Enterprise-scale architecture

Backend engineering (Java, Python)

Distributed systems

Mentoring engineers

Customer collaboration

Hiring process involvement

Tools

Cloud-native platforms

Job description

The Opportunity

Firefly Enterprise brings Adobe's generative AI and creative technology into the heart of enterprise content production by helping large organizations create, adapt, and deliver on-brand content at production scale, inside the tools their teams already use.

We're looking for a Principal Scientist to be the technical anchor of a small, fast-growing team; a player-coach who is as comfortable in the architecture and the codebase as in a design review or a customer conversation.

This is a senior individual-contributor role. You won't carry direct reports or own headcount, but you will set the technical direction, raise the engineering bar, and mentor a team of software and machine-learning engineers. You'll partner closely with engineering managers on people leadership, and you'll be instrumental in interviewing and holding the hiring bar high.

Our charter spans two areas

• Audio/Video Solutions: The media-processing backbone for enterprise-scale content production: ingesting, transforming, generating, and delivering audio and video reliably at production volume.
• Extensibility: Enterprise agentic workflows and plug-ins that surface Firefly's enterprise capabilities directly inside Figma and other Adobe creative applications.

Impact You'll Make

• Set the long-term technical architecture and vision across both charter areas.
• Make enterprise-scale reliability and resiliency a first-class property of everything the team ships.
• Bring AI capabilities into the product and into how the team builds, raising both customer value and engineering velocity.
• Grow a scaling team of software and machine-learning engineers through hands‑on work and mentorship, i.e., lifting the technical bar by example.
• Turn customer and field insight into a credible, deliverable roadmap in partnership with adjacent teams.

What You'll Do

• Own the architecture for enterprise-scale audio/video media-processing pipelines by designing for throughput, latency, cost, and operational resilience at production volume.
• Architect the extensibility platform : agentic enterprise workflows and plug-ins that expose Firefly's enterprise capabilities inside Figma and other Adobe creative apps.
• Stay hands‑on by writing code, leading design and architecture reviews, and setting the engineering standards the team builds to.
• Mentor developers and specialists in machine learning alike, growing their technical judgment through the work.
• Play an instrumental role in hiring: interview, calibrate, and keep the bar high.
• Interface directly with customers and field/sales teams to identify real problems and collaborate across adjacent teams to shape the roadmap and deliver solutions.
• Manage collaborators and expectations across engineering, product, and the field; with clarity and follow‑through.
• Leverage AI capabilities to improve both what customers get and how the team develops software.

What You'll Bring

• 15+ years building large-scale distributed software systems.
• Proven experience operating at enterprise scale with a deep focus on reliability and resiliency .
• Strong backend engineering in Java, Python, or comparable technologies, with a solid command of distributed systems and cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with at least one of the team's two domains, and the ability to ramp on the other:
• Media processing: audio/video pipelines, transcoding, streaming, or large-scale media workflows.
• Extensibility: SDKs, plug‑in architectures, integration frameworks, or agentic systems.
• A track record of mentoring both software engineers and machine‑learning engineers and raising the technical bar across a team.
• Comfort working directly with customers and field/sales teams to translate problems into solutions.
• Strong collaborator management with the ability to set expectations and align across engineering, product, and the field.
• Excellent communication and the ability to make complex architecture legible to engineers, product leaders, and executives.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience employing AI capabilities for both customer‑facing value and internal product development.
• Familiarity with LLM application architectures, RAG, AI orchestration frameworks, MCP, or agentic systems.
• Experience building integrations or plug‑ins for Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, or comparable creative ecosystems.
• Depth in enterprise‑scale media processing, namely, codecs, streaming infrastructure, or GPU‑accelerated media pipelines.
• Familiarity with enterprise identity, security, governance, and compliance frameworks.
• Contributions to open‑source software or widely adopted developer platforms.

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.

Let’s Adobe together

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