Principal Engineer AI/ML
Adobe
Job Summary
We are seeking a highly experienced and innovative Principal Engineer to join the GenStudio Engineering team. This role is ideal for a technical leader who thrives in a fast-paced environment and is passionate about building scalable, high-impact software solutions. You will drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and influence the technical direction of GenStudio, focusing on designing, building, testing, and maintaining AI/ML-based systems and applications.
Must Have
- 14+ years of experience in software engineering with technical leadership
- Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
- Proven expertise in Machine Learning and Deep Learning
- Strong understanding of transfer learning principles
- Proficiency in Python and ML/DL frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow/Keras, CUDA, Hugging Face, JAX)
- Experience designing and deploying scalable AI/ML systems for GPU/TPU environments
- Solid grasp of data engineering concepts
- Ability to balance theoretical ML knowledge with practical implementation
- Strong understanding of how to transform models into reliable, production-grade services
Good to Have
- Recognized as a thought leader within and beyond the organization
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and shaping engineering culture
- Demonstrated ability to drive innovation and evangelize new technologies
- Experience with building GenAI-first applications
- Contributions to industry forums, conferences, or open-source communities
Perks & Benefits
- Exceptional work environment
- Ongoing feedback through Check-In approach
- Access to meaningful benefits
- Equal Employment Opportunity employer
- Accommodation for disabilities
Job Description
The Opportunity
We are seeking a highly experienced and innovative Principal Engineer to join the GenStudio Engineering team. This role is ideal for a technical leader who thrives in a fast-paced environment and is passionate about building scalable, high-impact software solutions. You will drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and influence the technical direction of GenStudio.
What You’ll Do
- Design, build, test, and maintain AI/ML-based systems and applications that serve as the backbone of scalable, production-ready technology stacks.
- Frame product features as ML tasks (e.g., classification, recommendation, context engineering).
- Analyze trade-offs across cost, latency, and accuracy while ensuring compliance with UX, privacy, legal, and security constraints.
- Assess data distribution (variance, sampling, drift) and manage data labeling workflows involving LLMs, SMEs, or user-generated activity.
- Organize datasets for training, validation, and testing, and engineer high-quality features using normalization, smoothing, and weighting techniques.
- Implement and adapt techniques from academic research and industry papers; evaluate algorithmic trade-offs considering data requirements, latency, and runtime.
- Handle cold-start scenarios and mitigate overfitting/underfitting challenges.
- Define offline benchmarks and metrics; design and analyze A/B tests to validate online performance.
- Architect scalable ML systems (e.g., multi-agent, recommender, active learning, multi-stage model training, enterprise search) for both offline and online workflows.
- Optimize model development and deployment in GPU/TPU environments using PyTorch.
- Work cross-functionally with data, research, and product teams to translate models into production-ready services.
What You’ll Need to Succeed
- 14+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong track record of technical leadership.
- Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
- Proven expertise in Machine Learning and Deep Learning, including model design, optimization, and fine-tuning.
- Strong understanding of transfer learning principles and their application in production settings.
- Proficiency in Python (especially for data workflows) and experience with ML/DL frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow/Keras, CUDA, Hugging Face, and JAX.
- Experience designing and deploying scalable AI/ML systems optimized for GPU/TPU environments.
- Solid grasp of data engineering concepts—including dataset management, feature engineering, and handling data drift.
- Ability to balance theoretical ML knowledge with practical, high-performance implementation.
- Strong understanding of how to transform models into reliable, production-grade services.
Preferred Attributes
- Recognized as a thought leader within and beyond the organization.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and shaping engineering culture.
- Demonstrated ability to drive innovation and evangelize new technologies.
- Experience with building GenAI-first applications.
- Contributions to industry forums, conferences, or open-source communities.
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 $193,900 -- $362,400 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.
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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