Senior Staff ML Engineer - Media Intelligence Platform Lead

Adobe Inc.; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 239,000 - 346,000; Full time

Job summary

Adobe's Firefly Foundry is hiring a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to architect and lead the data processing, indexing, and search infrastructure behind its media intelligence platform. You will own scalable pipelines, the hybrid retrieval stack, and tool interfaces that enable agentic workflows with grounded results and provenance.

As a senior technical lead, you will set multi-year direction for the platform, mentor engineers, and drive design decisions that improve recall, freshness,

Qualifications

• 10+ years in machine learning, data, or infrastructure engineering, including ownership of large-scale data processing and/or search systems in production.
• Strong data-engineering foundations and experience with batch/streaming pipelines.
• Experience building retrieval for LLM and agentic systems (RAG, multimodal/search, grounding and provenance).

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable data-processing pipelines transforming raw media and signals into structured, searchable intelligence at enterprise scale.
• Contribute to the technical vision and architecture for the media-intelligence data platform and search stack.
• Architect the indexing and search infrastructure—hybrid lexical + vector retrieval, multimodal search, ranking and reranking, and metadata filtering.
• Make search a first-class capability for agentic workflows with tool interfaces and grounding contracts.
• Own index lifecycle and freshness with incremental and streaming indexing, backfills, and versioning.
• Engineer for enterprise from the ground up with per-tenant isolation and data residency controls.
• Define and enforce retrieval quality gates with offline/online evaluation and drift monitoring.
• Own performance and cost envelope of the platform including latency SLAs and GPU-accelerated enrichment.
• Build the platform underneath it all with rapid deployment, observability, and monitoring.
• Run these systems at enterprise scale with on-call, incident response, and postmortems.
• Lead technically across teams, setting standards and mentoring senior engineers.

Education

MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Adobe's Firefly Foundry is hiring a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to architect and lead the data processing, indexing, and search infrastructure behind its media intelligence platform. You will own scalable pipelines, the hybrid retrieval stack, and tool interfaces that enable agentic workflows with grounded results and provenance.

As a senior technical lead, you will set multi-year direction for the platform, mentor engineers, and drive design decisions that improve recall, freshness,