Principal Engineer AI/ML

Position Overview

Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We empower everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences. We’re on a mission to hire the very best while creating exceptional employee experiences.

We are seeking a highly experienced and innovative Principal Engineer to join the GenStudio Engineering team. In this fast-paced role, you will drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and influence the technical direction of GenStudio by building scalable, high-impact AI/ML systems.

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

Required Qualifications

• 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 Qualifications

• 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.

Benefits & Perks

• Compensation: The U.S. pay range for this position is $206,400 -- $379,100 annually; in California, the range is $261,800 - $379,100. Additional incentives and benefits may apply based on role and location.