The Challenge
Search, Discovery, and Content AI (SDC) plays a crucial role in Adobe's search ecosystem. It assists creative professionals and enterprise clients in locating and using digital assets such as images, videos, and documents. As demand increases for intuitive search and AI assistant functions within Adobe's Creativity & Productivity (C&P) surfaces (DC, Firefly, Lightroom, Express, CC), SDC is evolving into a generative AI engine. This development builds how enterprise customers discover and engage with creative assets at scale.
Our team builds the infrastructure for interpreting intent, delivering personalized recommendations, and orchestrating actions. If working at the intersection of machine learning, generative AI, and real-time systems excites you, we’d love to have you join us.
The Opportunity
We're looking for a senior technical leader in information retrieval, search indexing, and distributed systems. You'll be responsible for the architecture of indexing documents in Elasticsearch/Lucene, relevance and ranking algorithms, large-scale data pipelines, ML-powered search, and multi-lingual query processing. The role carries real authority: you'll independently develop a unified search and assistant strategy across multiple surfaces. You'll serve as the primary technical authority working with Product, Applied Research, and engineering leads, and make architecture decisions with long-term impact.
We especially want engineers who build with AI daily. They use coding agents, LLM-based tools, and automation to develop, prototype, and ship faster and better. They don’t just build AI features for users.
Responsibilities
- Define the technical direction for hybrid search and AI assistant features throughout Adobe's C&P interfaces. Develop a unified method that functions effectively across different surfaces with varied data models and usage behaviors.
- Own the architecture for indexing, query processing, ranking, and recommendations, including ML-based ranking and assistant workflows. Scale to billions of assets in real time.
- Set direction for platform evolution: benchmark new approaches to relevance, latency, and cost, and make build-vs-buy calls, including where generative AI can replace older methods.
- Employ AI coding agents (such as Claude Code) and LLM-assisted workflows routinely for development, testing, and documentation. Encourage widespread usage across teams.
- Set and enforce engineering standards (build reviews, code quality, performance benchmarks). Mentor engineers on distributed systems, search expertise, and AI-assisted development.
What You Need to Succeed
- B.Tech or M.Tech in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
- 13+ years of industry experience, with a track record of owning architecture for large-scale, production distributed systems.
- Proven experience setting technical direction across product areas with different data structures and customer needs. Comfort acting as the lead technical expert alongside Product and Applied Research/ML teams, and turning early-stage research into production architecture.
- Deep hands-on skills in Java and/or Python, stream processing (Kafka, Storm, Hadoop, Spark), and large-scale ingestion/indexing pipelines in production.
- Strong background in REST/web services architecture and AWS infrastructure (compute, storage, messaging, scaling).
- Substantial Elasticsearch/Solr experience: index build, sharding strategy, cluster architecture at scale, and a solid grasp of search internals like inverted indexes and query processing.
- Semantic search or AI assistant experience (embeddings, vector search, RAG, agentic build) is strongly preferred.
- Daily use of AI coding tools and agentic workflows (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor), applying LLMs for code generation, architecture development, testing, or documentation as standard practice.
- RDBMS/NoSQL data modeling experience is a plus.
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.
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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.