Sr Director, ML (Foundry)

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!

We’re looking for a Sr Director, ML Engineering and AI to build and lead the team driving our next generation of AI-native content creation with Firefly Foundry!

In this role, you’ll own the AI and engineering strategy and execution behind Foundry models that power everything from franchise extensions and new IP development to modern GenAI workflows at production scale. You’ll partner closely with studio, product, and infrastructure teams to turn ambitious creative visions into reliable, high-performance ML systems that transform how content is conceived, produced, and delivered.

• Own the end-to-end ML strategy for our Foundry engineering and science across Generative Media models, from applied research to production deployment.

• Lead and grow a high-performing team of applied scientists and ML engineers; set clear goals, coach senior talent, and create a culture of experimentation, rigor, and delivery.

• Design and evolve our multi-tier model stack: foundation models, franchise models, on-set integration, and social/short-form extensions, and workflows.

• Partner closely with studio, production, and product teams to translate creative and business requirements into concrete ML roadmaps, milestones, and success metrics.

• Drive the technical architecture for training and inference at scale: data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, model lifecycle, and GPU/accelerator utilization across a multi-year horizon.

• Establish and own quality bars for generative output (visual fidelity, temporal consistency, editability, safety) and build the evaluation tools, benchmarks, and human-in-the-loop processes to enforce them.

• Collaborate with infrastructure and platform teams to design scalable, cost-efficient serving for real-time on-set use cases and high-volume social content generation.

• Stay on top of the GenAI research ecosystem and selectively bring in new techniques (e.g., diffusion, video transformers, latent video models, control/adapters) when they materially improve capability, cost, or speed.

• 10+ years of experience in applied machine learning, including 4+ years leading senior ML/engineering teams building real products at scale.

• Deep hands-on expertise with modern generative models (diffusion, transformers, VAEs, latent video models, or similar) and experience taking at least one such system into production.

• Strong background in large-scale training and inference: distributed training, GPU/accelerator stacks (e.g., CUDA, NCCL), model optimization/quantization, and performance debugging.

• Proven ability to design and ship ML systems end-to-end: data pipelines, training, eval, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

• Experience working with high-resolution media (4K+ video, high bit-depth pipelines) or adjacent domains where bandwidth and latency constraints matter.

• Excellent leadership and communication skills; able to work directly with creative, production, and business stakeholders and turn ambiguous problems into clear technical plans.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals (Python, modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch/JAX, production code quality, CI/CD, observability).

• Bachelor’s/Master’s/PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience building and leading advanced ML systems.

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.

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