Principal ML Engineer — Scalable Data Pipelines

Adobe; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 268,000 - 388,000; Full time

Job summary

Adobe seeks a Principal ML Engineer to architect and scale the multimodal data processing pipelines and infrastructure behind Firefly’s multimodal foundation models (image, video, audio). You will build distributed, GPU-accelerated systems that turn billions of raw assets into training-ready data at scale, shaping how fast and how well models learn.

This senior IC role sits at the intersection of data engineering, infrastructure, and applied ML, with broad technical influence across teams and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, ML infrastructure, or distributed systems at large scale.
• Strong software engineering background with experience in distributed systems and Ray/Spark.
• Proficiency in Python plus a systems language (C++, Rust, Go, or Java) with debugging skills.
• Deep knowledge of databases and storage at scale, data lakes, indexing and retrieval.
• Strong ML background, optimizing GPU inference pipelines for large models.

Responsibilities

• Architect and optimize large-scale distributed pipelines turning billions of assets into training-ready data.
• Scale inference throughput across pipelines, optimizing batching and hardware utilization.
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks across ingestion, processing, and delivery.
• Design scalable data infrastructure for billions of data points across storage and compute.
• Apply expertise in Ray or equivalent to orchestrate GPU/CPU-heavy workloads.
• Own architecture decisions: databases, storage, scheduling, and GPU cluster utilization.
• Drive data curation for model training and collaborate with modeling teams to improve training outcomes.
• Operate as a hands-on technical leader bridging data engineering and ML.

Skills

Distributed systems

Ray framework

Python

C++

Rust

Go

Spark

Debugging

GPU workloads

Education

Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science/Engineering/ML

Tools

Ray

Spark

GPU clusters

Job description

Adobe seeks a Principal ML Engineer to architect and scale the multimodal data processing pipelines and infrastructure behind Firefly’s multimodal foundation models (image, video, audio). You will build distributed, GPU-accelerated systems that turn billions of raw assets into training-ready data at scale, shaping how fast and how well models learn.

This senior IC role sits at the intersection of data engineering, infrastructure, and applied ML, with broad technical influence across teams and