at Adobe
Location
San Jose
Compensation
$159k–$302k USD
Posted
2 weeks ago
Market range · company + function + seniority
p25 · target · p75 · n=192
Posted $302k · in the market band
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The Opportunity
We're seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead the Agent Platform work for Firefly Boards. Boards is bringing agentic AI to the infinite canvas, and this role owns the engineering systems that make that work production-grade: the server-side agent runtime, the integration with Adobe's central agent platform, and the application stack that lets the agent act on the canvas alongside human users in real time. You'll partner closely with the agentic team that owns the intelligence side of the product (skills, model selection, agent quality), with a deliberate split of responsibilities. They define what the agent does and how well it does it. You define the systems it runs on.
Firefly Boards is an AI-powered mood-boarding and ideation app that provides a non-linear infinite canvas. It enables a new generation of creatives to embrace generative AI and those who find the linear workflows of legacy software restrictive. Images and videos can be imported or generated using AI models and edited, remixed, iterated on, and organized flexibly, making it easier for artists to visualize and develop ideas on their own or in collaboration.
What You'll Do
This role has three primary areas of ownership and several secondary responsibilities. The work spans the full stack — server-side runtime, web client, and the cross-team architecture that ties them together.
Primary:
Server-side agent runtime. Stand up and own the service that runs Boards' agent workflows. State management, checkpointing, interrupt-and-resume across long-running operations, error recovery, and observability. This is the spine of the system and the foundation everything else builds on.
Browser/server execution boundary. Define and own how server-side workflows dispatch to browser-only tools (canvas operations, viewport state, selection) and resume cleanly. Design the protocol, the runtime contract, and the in-client tool registration and invocation surface. Make it reliable under multiplayer conditions where humans and agents are editing the same document.
Agent platform integration. Own the integration between Boards' agent runtime and Adobe's central agent platform. Co-shape platform contracts where Boards needs services that don't yet exist in the platform-supported shape. This is a cross-org partnership, not a one-off integration.
Secondary:
Boards backend services for agentic consumption. Refactoring existing Boards APIs and adding new ones to be agent-callable. API design under real constraints: idempotency, transactional boundaries, undo, multiplayer-aware mutations.
Production-grade systems concerns. End-to-end observability and tracing for agent runs. Latency budgets across runtime, tools, and model calls. Deployment, rollout, rollback. The work that turns a working prototype into something that's operable at scale.
How The Role Works
This is a senior IC role, not a tech lead role. You set engineering direction for the agent platform work and partner across organizational boundaries to make the integration with Adobe's central agent platform succeed. The agentic team owns the intelligence side of the product — skills, prompts, tool design, model selection, and agent-quality evaluation. You own the systems they build on. The contract between the two teams is jointly designed; you're peers, with shared accountability for the product working end-to-end.
Cross-team architecture is a real part of this role. You'll partner with Adobe's central agent platform team, the document services platform, model registry, identity, and security. Influence-without-authority across organizations is the operating mode.
Ideal Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science
10+ years of product engineering experience, with significant ownership of production systems at scale
Demonstrated full stack depth: backend services and modern web client work in roughly equal measure. JavaScript/TypeScript, declarative UI frameworks (React, Lit, Vue), and a strong server-side language
Distributed systems depth. Real experience with state management, checkpointing, async work, long-running operations, and recovery from partial failure. Track record of designing and operating systems with these properties, not just consuming them
Experience integrating with a central platform team as a tenant. Has done the work of being an early customer of an internal platform and shaping it from that position
Experience designing service APIs and microservices, including REST or equivalent contracts that hold up across teams
Experience driving sophisticated software architecture, design, and development across multiple teams or organizations
Track record of writing clean, testable code and creating reusable components
Strong written and verbal communication. Comfortable shaping technical decisions in cross-org forums
Preferred Qualifications
Experience building agentic or retrieval-augmented (RAG) systems with workflow engines such as LangGraph, or comparable runtime orchestration for tool-using LLM applications
Experience with real-time collaborative or multiplayer applications, especially the browser/server boundary in a collaborative editor
Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent tool design patterns
Experience with production LLM systems: evaluation infrastructure, observability, latency optimization, prompt and context engineering at the system level
Experience with collaborative document models or CRDT-based systems
Experience building image, video, or multimedia applications
Experience with development tools such as Jenkins, GitHub, lint, etc.
Experience with improving performance and stability of large web applications
Experience with Accessibility (A11y) and Localization
Experience working in an Agile development environment
This role is US-based. San Francisco, San Jose, and New York are highly preferred for proximity to partner teams. Remote work will be considered for exceptional candidates.
#FireflyBoards
#FireflyGenAI
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.
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 protected characteristic. Learn more.
Adobe aims to make our Careers website and recruiting process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email accommodations@adobe.com or call +1 408-536-3015.
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.
Expected Pay Range:
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 $159,200 -- $301,600 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 $208,300 - $301,600

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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