Senior Manager, Applied Science

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!

The Opportunity

Adobe Firefly Foundry is a managed generative-AI service purpose-built for enterprises that need to scale content creation without compromising brand safety or workflow efficiency. By letting customers train private Firefly models on their own intellectual property—under strict data isolation and copyright indemnification—and deploy those models directly into Adobe Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud, and proprietary platforms via Firefly Services APIs, Foundry closes the gap left by consumer‑grade GenAI tools and empowers brands to deliver ten‑times the creative output at professional quality.

As a Manager for Applied Research at Adobe, you will be the technical and strategic steward of this platform, translating pioneering research into secure, production‑ready capabilities, championing them in customer and industry settings, and building the world‑class team that will turn vision into reality.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow a distributed team focused on Generative AI.
• Define and execute strategy for acquiring, processing, curating, annotating, versioning, and ensuring quality of large-scale datasets to support diverse customer use cases.
• Enable novel capabilities for controllable and precise multi-modal content generation with Generative AI, solving real customer problems.
• Build and maintain scalable, efficient data, pre-training, and post-training pipelines across the ML model lifecycle.
• Collaborate with researchers, ML engineers, and PMs to align on data, architecture, and control needs for new models.
• Evaluate and integrate tools and methodologies to enhance infrastructure and workflows.
• Champion data diversity, bias mitigation, and ethical AI practices.
• Provide technical leadership and foster a culture of innovation.
• Partner across teams to align priorities and share best practices.

Qualifications:

• Ph.D. in CS, Data Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or related field—or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years in engineering and research leadership, managing full lifecycle of ML models from research to direct impact on customer workflows.
• Deep understanding of ML data lifecycles, especially for modern generative models.
• Expertise in data quality, governance, versioning, and annotation platforms.
• Proficiency with cloud tech (AWS, Azure, GCP, Spark, Databricks, Snowflake).
• Strong grasp of data privacy, security, and ethical AI principles.
• Excellent leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Experience with large-scale image/video datasets and training generative models.

Preferred:

• Experience with computer graphics and VFX pipelines.
• Experience in computer vision, multimedia, or creative content ecosystems.
• Contributions to open-source tools, publications, or patents in computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics.
• Proven success supporting at-scale generative model training

#FireflyGenAI

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several  U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $171,600 -- $357,900 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process. 



In California, the pay range for this position is $247,200 - $357,900
In Washington, the pay range for this position is $224,900 - $325,700


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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