Principal AI Architect

Our Company
Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We give everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences! We’re passionate about empowering people to create beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, and transform how companies interact with customers across every screen. 
We’re on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours!

As one of the world’s most innovative software companies whose products touch billions of people around the world, Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences.

Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and setting the standard 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.

Adobe is looking for a passionate and exceptionally skilled AI Principal Architect to join our team in Austin, TX! This groundbreaking opportunity places you at the forefront of modern AI and Generative AI technologies. You'll be instrumental in defining and implementing our architectural vision while working hands-on with production AI systems. Your work will empower our engineering teams to build, ship, and operate scalable AI services that impact millions globally.

We are seeking a Senior / Principal Software Architect – AI & Generative AI who combines deep architectural leadership with hands-on production engineering. This role is intentionally hands-on: you will spend approximately 30–50% of your time writing, reviewing, and maintaining production-quality code, not just proofs of concept.

You will help define the architectural vision for AI-driven systems while also partnering directly with engineering teams to build, ship, and operate scalable AI services in production. This is a role for an architect who leads by example and sets the technical bar through real, deployable implementations.

• Design, implement, and maintain production-ready AI/ML and GenAI services, not just prototypes.
• Write high-quality, testable, and maintainable code for core platform components, AI services, and shared libraries.
• Contribute directly to critically important code paths, setting standards for performance, reliability, and security.

• Serve as a hands-on technical leader, demonstrating standard methodologies through real implementations.
• Perform deep code reviews that improve system quality and mentor engineers through example.
• Partner with teams to deliver high business value features, addressing scalability, observability, fault tolerance, and operability.

• Participate in design-for-operations practices including monitoring, alerting, incident response, and postmortems.
• Continuously improve production systems based on real-world performance, cost, and reliability data.
• Balance architectural purity with pragmatic trade-offs required to deliver at scale.

• Architect and implement end-to-end AI/ML pipelines from data ingestion through deployment and monitoring.
• Build and ship LLM-powered assistants, RAG pipelines, and agentic services used by real customers at scale.
• Maintain a sustained 30–50% hands-on coding commitment alongside architectural and strategic responsibilities.

• Proven track record of writing production-quality code for large-scale systems, not just prototypes or research implementations.
• Strong coding skills in JavaScript, React, GraphQL, and at least one backend language such as Java, Kotlin, or Python.
• Experience owning systems end-to-end, including design, implementation, deployment, and long-term maintenance.

Significant project experience with NLP and LLM-based systems.

• A deep understanding of fundamental ML concepts (tensors, loss functions) and key neural network architectures.
• Knowledge in Transformers (including attention mechanisms), CLIP, T5, and Diffusion Models. Most importantly, passion to tinker and learn.
• Proven ability to apply and adapt models for specific business problems, including fine-tuning techniques like LoRA and Dreambooth.

• Experience designing systems where you were also responsible for shipping and operating the code in production.
• Comfortable being on the critical path for delivery while maintaining architectural integrity.

At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans.  Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).

In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.

State-Specific Notices:

California:

Fair Chance Ordinances

Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

Colorado:

Application Window Notice

If this role is open to hiring in Colorado (as listed on the job posting), the application window will remain open until at least the date and time stated above in Pacific Time, in compliance with Colorado pay transparency regulations. If this role does not have Colorado listed as a hiring location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based on hiring needs.

Massachusetts:

Massachusetts Legal Notice

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

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 applicable characteristics protected by law. Learn more.

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