Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Creative AI

Adobe Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Adobe Inc. seeks a high-impact technical leader to anchor its content supply-chain vision for Fortune 100 clients. You will land strategic engagements, define architecture depth, and translate complex AI/content workflows into executive-ready value.

You will mentor FDCTs, craft reusable patterns, and deliver reference demos that shape the org’s roadmap. This is a hands-on role combining engineering craft with strategic influence in a fast-paced Adobe scale environment.

Responsibilities

• Land the accounts that have to land.
• Set the technical and creative bar.
• Hold the C-suite room.
• Set roadmap direction, not just feedback.
• Lift the bench.
• Demo your own work – script, produce, edit.

Job description

The Opportunity

Every global brand is now a content factory – thousands of on‑brand variations a quarter across static, video, and 3D, shipped in days not weeks. We embed with enterprise customers, learn their content supply chain end‑to‑end, and build the custom AI‑powered workflows that get them there – on Adobe Firefly Services, Firefly Creative Production (our node‑based workflow builder), and Adobe Brand Intelligence (ABI) for brand validation and compliance.

The base FDCT bench gets customers there; you set the bar they reach for. You take the engagements no one else can land – the Fortune 100 with the impossible timeline, the strategic account where the whole FDE motion has to prove itself, the fractured stack where nothing works the way the docs say. The deal is signed, but the users never signed up for it – and here the politics are worse, the stack messier, the renewal bigger. You go in first; the bench follows.

You are the technical and creative anchor of the org – the team gets sharper around you, and when you’re in the C‑suite room, customers stop second‑guessing the timeline.

We are not pre‑sales. We are not consultants. We are technical creators who ship, who get used – and who make everyone around us better.

What you’ll do

• Land the accounts that have to land. The strategic top‑tier customer where the FDE motion has to prove itself, the first engagement in a new vertical, the multi‑year arc that defines the org’s reputation. You earn adoption where it’s hardest – the most resistant users, the most fractured stack – and turn an at‑risk flagship into the account others want to be.
• Set the technical and creative bar. Architecture, technology choices, reusable patterns at architect depth – yours to make and defend, and to adjust when the field proves you wrong. The P40 you onboard lands their first win faster because of the patterns you set.
• Hold the C‑suite room. CMOs, CIOs, CTOs, agency leadership. Translate AI and content‑supply‑chain complexity into something a board chair signs off on. Bring deals home; bring renewals home.
• Set roadmap direction, not just feedback. When a product gap blocks adoption across accounts, you own the architecture of the workaround, take the gap upstream with the weight to actually move the roadmap, and commit the fix yourself when that’s faster. You chase cross‑team dependencies until they move.
• Lift the bench. Mentor the FDCTs around you – live working sessions, code reviews, internal masterclasses. Pair with a P40 in the morning and pitch a Fortune 100 CMO in the afternoon, and both walk away sharper.
• Demo your own work – script, produce, edit. The demos you create become the org’s reference demos.

What you’ll bring

• You've earned adoption where it's hardest. Not one win – a track record of walking into the most resistant users, the most fractured stacks, and the highest‑stakes renewals, and driving repeat, at‑scale adoption anyway. You measure yourself in renewals saved and churns averted, not features shipped.
• You set direction others follow. You've set technical or creative direction in a prior role – not just executed someone else’s spec. Point to the “before me / after me” change you drove, and to the people who got better because of you.
• C‑suite credibility. You hold the room with CMOs, CIOs, and CTOs and walk out with the deal or the renewal – translating tech to business value without losing the engineers in the room.
• Creative content supply‑chain craft at architect depth. Brand systems, design tokens, master‑to‑variant pipelines, brand‑compliance gates, agency‑to‑brand handoff, the Figma/PSD/INDD DAM Workfront/Frame.io chains. You debug a fractured creative‑ops setup faster than the customer’s own team.
• You still build it yourself. Architecture and production code that holds up under load – thin front‑ends, light back‑ends, custom nodes, multi‑system orchestration. You ship.
• A public portfolio. (Link or PDF at application) – shipped creative and technical work. Hard requirement; no portfolio, no review.
• Force multipliers – real, but teachable. Firefly Services, Firefly Creative Production, and Adobe Brand Intelligence mastery – you know what’s possible, what’s painful, what’s a year out, and you ramp adjacent surfaces in days. Adobe ecosystem (AEM, Workfront, Frame.io, App Builder) and Figma plugin/API/MCP depth are pluses.
• AI‑native building with judgment, at scale. Cursor/Claude Code/Copilot daily – your prompts are the ones the team copies, and you catch bad output instantly. You explore the frontier (ComfyUI, n8n, LangGraph, MCPs) so the team can use what works.

What we’re not looking for

• The order‑taker at scale. You delivered the flagship, called it done, and treated whether it stuck – or renewed – as someone else’s problem.
• Single‑track careers. Software‑engineering‑only without creative depth, or creative‑direction‑only without shipping engineering. We need both, at architect depth.
• “Thought leaders” without shipped work. Every line on your resume comes with an artifact.
• Senior ICs who’ve only executed. Fifteen years of someone else’s spec – the title fits, the role doesn’t.
• “My portfolio is private/under NDA.” If your entire body of work is invisible, come back when some of it isn’t.

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.