Manager, Firefly FDE

The Opportunity

Join our “DevOps for Content” revolution, where we partner with global brands and agencies to transform their end-to-end creative workflows—from ideation through activation—to unlock the GenAI-powered Content Supply Chain.

As a Manager, Forward Deployed AI Engineering, you will lead, mentor, and inspire a team of Forward Deployed AI Engineers (FDEs)—creative technologists who prototype, build, and launch GenAI-powered solutions and products directly with customers. Your mission is to cultivate top engineering talent, instill a culture of rapid innovation and delivery excellence, and ensure every engagement drives measurable business impact.

This role requires strong, hands-on technical leadership, people mentorship, and the ability to scale GenAI adoption in enterprise environments. You’ll partner closely with the Director, Forward Deployed AI Engineering, to build a world-class product engineering org with customer-facing DNA. If you thrive on growing talent, scaling engineering excellence, and translating latest AI research into real-world solutions, this is your stage.

What You’ll Do

Team Leadership

· Recruit, coach, and empower a high-performing team of Forward Deployed AI Engineers (and select Forward Deployed AI Architects).

· Act as both mentor and peer-level engineer—reviewing code, shaping architectures, and guiding engineers on technical depth, delivery velocity, and customer impact.

· Cultivate a culture of engineering excellence, experimentation, and AI tinkering, ensuring the team stays at the frontier of generative AI and enterprise delivery.

· Develop future leaders by strengthening technical judgment, customer-facing confidence, and multi-functional influence.

Customer Engagement & Technical Delivery

· Sponsor and engage directly in strategic customer programs. Roll up your sleeves to build, prototype, and launch solutions and products with your engineers when customer concerns or critical achievements arise.

· Ensure your teams apply Forward Deployed Engineering principles: embedded collaboration, rapid prototyping, iterative feedback, and production-grade handoffs.

· Serve as the point of contact for technical and delivery challenges, balancing innovation with governance, reliability, and scale when addressing blocking issues.

· Champion delivery excellence—every engagement must tie back to measurable value realization and customer adoption.

Technical Leadership & Standards

· Define and enforce engineering standards across pods, including CI/CD pipelines, reusable frameworks, architecture playbooks, and model governance practices.

· Partner with Directors of Forward Deployed Engineering and Architecture to align technical approaches across the org and codify patterns into scalable, reusable assets.

· Funnel field-proven innovations and standards into Adobe Firefly and GenStudio roadmaps—ensuring product strategy is shaped by customer reality.

Thought Leadership & Cross-Team Enablement

· Stay at the forefront of generative AI, creative automation, and enterprise integration—keeping your teams current and inspired.

· Foster internal knowledge sharing—publishing playbooks, reusable modules, and lessons learned that accelerate the entire organization.

· Represent your team in customer workshops, internal reviews, and external forums, showcasing the engineering craft and thought leadership of the FDE org.

What You Bring

· Technical Credibility – 8+ years of software engineering, AI/ML, or technical consulting experience, with recent hands-on development in full-stack, cloud, and GenAI applications. You can dive into code, architecture, or delivery sprints when needed.

· People Leadership – More than 3 years in managing people or leading technical teams. Experienced in mentoring, coaching, and developing engineers and architects into highly capable technical and customer-facing talent.

· GenAI Mastery – Direct experience with modern AI technologies, including LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Llama, Mistral), diffusion models (Firefly, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E), RAG pipelines, vector databases, and agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen).

· Adobe Platform Fluency – Strong working knowledge of Adobe Firefly APIs, Creative Cloud SDKs, GenStudio for Performance Marketing, and enterprise integration patterns.

· DevOps & Delivery Excellence – Expertise in cloud deployments (AWS, Azure), CI/CD, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and enterprise-grade delivery with governance, security, and monitoring.

· Customer-Facing Leadership – Track record of engaging directly with enterprise customers, simplifying technical complexity, and earning trust as both an engineer and a strategic partner.

· Culture Builder – Ability to cultivate a high-performance, customer-obsessed culture grounded in engineering excellence, continuous learning, and open collaboration.

· Startup DNA – Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments; relentless about finding faster, better, more innovative ways to deliver impact for customers and scale patterns across the org.

· Flexibility & Presence – Adaptable and energized by balancing hands-on engineering with people leadership. Willingness to travel up to 30% to support customers and teams in person.

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.

Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours.

Let’s Adobe together

At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.

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. Learn more.

Adobe aims to make our Careers website and recruiting process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email accommodations@adobe.com.

AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:

Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.

At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI — and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it’s restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.