Engineering Manager, Express AI Foundations

The opportunity

Adobe Express enables everyone individuals and large organizations alike to produce impressive content effortlessly. The AI Foundations team builds the flexible scalable AI framework that powers creativity at scale across design imaging motion and personalization.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow a team of engineers building the AI infrastructure for Adobe Express. This role sits at the intersection of technical leadership and people management you will own the delivery of the AI stack spanning Agentic AI Imaging AI Motion AI and Personalization AI while developing the engineers who build it. You will partner closely with product research and cross-functional engineering teams to shape the technical direction of one of Adobes most strategic platforms.

This is an early-level people management role (M30) well suited to someone with a strong engineering foundation who has been leading& managingteams for35 years and is looking to deepen their impact through the growth of others and the delivery of high-consequence systems at scale.

Whatyoulldo

Technical direction and delivery

• Own end-to-end delivery of AI infrastructure workstreams including LLM orchestration inference services data pipelines and evaluation frameworks from planning through production.

• Maintain strong enough technical depth toparticipatein system design reviews challenge architectural decisions and unblock your team on complex problems.

• Work with your team to set and meet engineering quality standards: observability fault tolerance latency guarantees security and responsible AI practices including bias awareness and data privacy for AI systems.

• Make deliberate explicit calls on technical debt versus feature velocity and hold the team accountabletothose decisions.

• Develop and communicate a coherent technical roadmap for your area balancing immediate delivery with sustainable long-term architecture.

Cross-functional partnership

• Partner with product management & engineering leadership to decompose high-level product requirements into concrete technical requirements breaking ambiguous asks into scoped workstreams with clear dependencies effort estimates and sequencing.

• Drive prioritization across competing demands balancing new feature work infrastructure investment and reliability improvements with a clear defensible rationale the team and stakeholders can align on.

• Collaborate with AI research data science and platform teams to integrate in-house and third-party models and APIs into production-quality serving systems.

• Represent your teams work and direction to senior stakeholders communicating progress risks and technical trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Team leadership and people development

• Manage and grow a team of 610 engineers across varying seniority levels providing regular coaching feedback and career development support.

• Drive a strong hiring bar own the full recruiting lifecycle for your team from sourcing through offer and help build an inclusive high-performing culture.

• Foster a collaborative psychologically safe environment where engineers can do their best work and grow into senior and staff roles.

Whatyoullbring

• 35 years of engineering management experience witha track recordof delivering complex infrastructure or platform projects through a team.

• A strong technical foundation in distributed systems AI/ML infrastructure or large-scale service development enough to earn credibility with senior engineers and make sound architectural trade-offs.

• Experience owning team execution end-to-end including structured prioritization across competing workstreams dependency management and shipping reliably in an agile fast-moving environment. Can articulate trade-off decisions clearly not just make them.

• Clear structured communication skills able to translate technical trade-offs into business terms for PMs and non-technical stakeholders and to influence direction without authority across teams.

• Comfort navigating ambiguity: defining scope making decisions with incomplete information and adapting plans quickly as systems and priorities evolve.

• Working fluency in modern AI/ML concepts LLM orchestration inference infrastructure prompt engineering AI output evaluation and data pipelines sufficient to guide technical decisions set a quality bar and grow team capability.

• Demonstrated ability to grow engineers: coaching setting expectations giving actionable feedback and supporting career progression at multiple levels.

Preferred qualifications

• Mastersdegree or equivalent experience in Computer Science Machine Learning ora relatedfield.

• Background as a hands-on engineer in data infrastructure ML platform or large-scale backend systems before moving into management.

• Experience hiring and ramping engineers across a range of seniority levels including senior and staff engineers.

• Exposure to Generative AI development LLMs diffusion models or multimodal systems either as an individual contributor or as a manager overseeing such work.

• Familiarity withMLOpspractices: feature stores model registries evaluation pipelines and deployment workflows.

• Actively tracks emerging AI/ML trends and has a considered view onwhatsapplicable versus overhyped and can bring that perspective into team planning conversations.

• Awareness of security data privacy and responsible AI concerns specific to AI-backed systems including bias safety and handling of user data in model pipelines.

Why Adobe

At Adobe we are crafting the future of creativity through intelligence. The AI Foundations team combines the agility of a startup with the scale and mission of one of the worlds leading software companies. As an Engineering Manager on this team you will shape the people systems and practices that bring adaptive autonomous and human-centered AI to millions of creators worldwide and develop the next generation of engineering talent along the way.