Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering, Creative AI

Adobe; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Adobe is seeking a talented leader for the Forward Deployed Creative Technologist (FDCT) role based in San Jose, California. The ideal candidate will blend creative production and technical expertise, driving innovative workflows for enterprise customers.

As a key player, you will lead a team, code actively, and focus on delivering results that satisfy customer needs while mentoring your team. Strong experience in management within the creative technology sector is essential. Adobe values diverse talent and is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer.

Qualifications

• 8–12 years of experience in creative production and technical building.
• Experience in management and team growth.
• Production code experience within the last 6 months.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of FDCTs while coding and coaching.
• Translate technical details to customer ROI.
• Build reusable templates and manage vendor quality.

Skills

Creative content supply-chain fluency

Management experience

Strong coding skills

Customer orientation

AI tooling usage

Tools

Adobe Firefly Services

Figma

Job description

The Opportunity

Every global brand is now a content factory. They need thousands of on‑brand asset variations every quarter—static, video, and increasingly 3D—and they need to ship them in days, not weeks. The customer who figures this out first wins the next decade of marketing.

We are the team that gets them there. Forward Deployed Creative Technologists (FDCTs) embed with enterprise customers, learn their content supply chain end‑to‑end, and craft custom AI‑powered creative workflows on top of Adobe Firefly Services and Firefly Creative Production (our node‑based workflow builder). We are not pre‑sales. We are not consultants. We are technical creators who ship.

What You’ll Do

• Lead a team of FDCTs as a hands‑on player‑coach. Spend ~50% of your week coding, demoing, and leading by example; the other ~50% hiring, growing, and coaching.
• Stay hands‑on. Code in the last 6 months — and the next 6. Write the reference workflow others learn from and ship.
• Hold the room with customers. Translate tech to ROI and walk away with renewals signed.
• Performance‑manage honestly. Run real 1:1s, set explicit expectations, make hard calls early, and document them.
• Grow the team. Every IC who reports to you should be more capable in 12 months than when they joined.
• Calibrate the bar across customers, engagements, and the FDCT bench. Work should look the same whether written by you or an IC.
• Build the playbook. Reusable patterns become shared repo templates, workflow templates, or upstream workflow nodes.
• Manage vendors and contractors where applicable, calibrating quality and rotating when needed.
• Feed Adobe product and engineering with real field signal and influence what gets built next.

What You’ll Bring

• 8–12 years straddling creative production and technical building. You have shipped both: creative work (motion, design, video, 3D, photography, brand systems) and technical work (apps, integrations, plugins, automation).
• Production code in the last 6 months.
• Management craft, with evidence. Hired ICs, ran PIPs, made promotion calls that stuck, navigated conflict, coached out, and grew at least 2–3 ICs now more senior.
• Creative content supply‑chain fluency. Understand briefs becoming assets, brand systems, design tokens, master files, channel variants, hand‑off through Figma / PSD / INDD to DAM and review‑and‑approval.
• Firefly Services and Workflow Builder fluency. Adobe ecosystem depth, Figma plugin/API fluency, and field awareness.
• Vibe‑coding with judgment. Daily AI‑tooling use (Cursor / Claude Code / Copilot) and set AI‑native bar for your team.
• Extreme ownership and a GSD attitude. Own outcomes end‑to‑end, ship ugly first, and refuse to let process slow you or your team.
• Extreme customer orientation. Hold C‑suite rooms, translate tech to ROI without losing engineers in the room.
• A great nose for money. Connect team work to business outcomes your exec sponsor cares about.
• A public portfolio showing shipped creative and shipped technical work you personally did.
• High EQ, low ego, willingness to travel 15–25 %.

What We’re Not Looking For

• Out‑of‑balance managers—no production code in 18+ months or hiding behind your team’s code.
• Senior ICs without management track record.
• PMs / program managers / consultants—every leader on this team writes code and produces creative work themselves.

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.