AEM Engineering Lead (IC) - Digital Engineering
Position Summary
The AEM Engineering Lead (IC) is a hands-on individual contributor who architects, develops, and optimizes enterprise-grade Adobe Experience Manager solutions within their product area. This role is delivery-first: the incoming lead fully integrates as an IC into the AEM codebase and ships production work directly. They operate as a lead of AI coding agents - decomposing work, directing, reviewing, and integrating the output of agentic tooling to multiply their own throughput and complete the bulk of delivery. In addition, partial bandwidth is allocated to leading a thin near-shore + offshore team and supervising the work they produce. The role maintains accountability for the overall engineering health of the product, participates in Agile ceremonies, and collaborates across all technology layers to deliver cohesive digital experiences.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
Hands-On Technical Delivery & Leadership
- Personally deliver production AEM code - components, integrations, and applications - as the primary mode of work.
- Define and drive the technical vision for AEM development across the product area while remaining deeply hands-on.
- Architect enterprise-grade AEM solutions with a focus on scalability, security, and performance.
- Establish and enforce best practices for AEM development, including performance, security, and monitoring.
- Lead technical decision-making and evaluate new AEM capabilities and Adobe ecosystem tools.
- Create technical design specifications and translate high-level architecture into working AEM implementations.
AI-Augmented Individual Contribution
- Operate as a lead of AI agents: plan, decompose, and delegate implementation tasks to AI coding agents, then review, correct, and integrate their output to completion.
- Use agentic tooling to multiply personal delivery throughput across AEM backend, integrations, and front-end work.
- Apply strong engineering judgment to validate AI-generated code against architecture, security, performance, and quality standards before it ships.
- Establish effective prompting, context-engineering, and verification patterns so AI-driven work remains correct, maintainable, and production-ready.
- Own end-to-end accountability for all delivered work regardless of whether it originated from the lead directly, an AI agent, or the supervised team.
AEM Development & Implementation
- Design, develop, and support AEM components, integrations, and applications on AEM 6.5 LTS.
- Expert-level OSGi knowledge: Declarative Services, @Component/@Reference lifecycle, bundle deployment, and Felix console debugging.
- Deep hands-on experience with Apache Sling (Models, Servlets, ResourceResolver) and JCR repository operations (JCR-SQL2 queries, event listeners, replication handlers).
- Deep expertise in AEM architecture, Sling, OSGi, and Java 8+ backend development.
- Design and maintain event-driven integrations using Apache Kafka (consumers, producers, topic management, secured SASL/SSL configurations).
- Build and maintain Apache Solr integrations for search indexing and content discovery.
- Configure and optimize AEM Dispatcher caching strategies, cache invalidation patterns, and dual-flush mechanisms (HTTP + Kafka).
- Integrate Adobe Target, Analytics, and other marketing tools for personalization and measurement.
- Build and maintain REST APIs for AEM integrations.
- Strong front-end architecture skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Redux (Rematch), and Ant Design.
- Work with Webpack build tooling, caching strategies, message queues, and NoSQL databases.
- Manage CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, Maven-based builds, CRX Package Manager deployment, and Nexus artifact management.
Quality & Testing
- Ensure robust testing practices for AEM components and integrations using JUnit 4, PowerMock/Mockito for OSGi services, and Jest/Enzyme for React components.
- Exceptional debugging, testing, and problem-solving skills.
- Monitor and optimize AEM performance, caching, and content delivery.
- Maintain high standards for code quality, security, and reliability using PMD, CheckStyle, SonarQube, and ESLint.
Thin Near/Offshore Team Supervision (Partial Bandwidth)
- With partial bandwidth, lead a thin near-shore + offshore team and supervise the work they deliver.
- Direct, review, and integrate team contributions; conduct code reviews to drive engineering best practices.
- Set clear, well-scoped tasks and verify completion to standard across the distributed team.
- Collaborate with marketing teams on personalization strategies and content architecture.
- Partner with product, design, and delivery teams to translate requirements into AEM solutions.
Product-Level Engineering Oversight
- Participate actively in Agile ceremonies (sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, backlog refinement) to ensure overall engineering progress aligns with roadmaps and timelines.
- Maintain awareness of engineering health across all technology layers of the product - not just AEM/content.
- Identify cross-layer risks, dependencies, and blockers; escalate proactively.
- Know when to engage subject matter experts for other technology layers (services, iOS, Android, web, React Native) and facilitate collaboration to resolve cross-cutting concerns.
- Ensure that AEM content delivery, integrations, and front-end components align with the needs of other client platforms and backend services.
Innovation & Continuous Learning
- Stay current with AEM platform evolution, Adobe ecosystem tools, and content management trends.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and methodologies for the content and experience layer, including AI-assisted engineering workflows.
- Drive adoption of modern AEM practices, cloud-native patterns, and front-end architecture improvements.
Required Skills & Experience
- 4+ years of experience implementing Adobe AEM 6.5 / AEM 6.5 LTS.
- Strong prior experience as a software developer and senior technical design resource.
- Deep expertise in AEM architecture, Apache Sling, OSGi Declarative Services, and Java 8+ (with readiness to adopt Java 21).
- Expert-level OSGi knowledge including bundle lifecycle, service registration, and dependency injection via @Component/@Reference.
- Experience with Apache Kafka for event-driven architecture (consumers, producers, DLQ handling).
- Strong front-end skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Redux, Webpack, and component library integration (Ant Design).
- Experience with AEM Dispatcher configuration, caching strategies, and cache invalidation.
- Experience with REST APIs, caching, message queues, and NoSQL databases.
- Experience with Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, Maven builds, and CRX Package Manager deployment workflows.
- Experience delivering mission-critical systems in a mature Agile organization.
- Hands-on, delivery-first mindset - primary value is shipping production code directly.
- Demonstrated ability (or strong aptitude) to use AI coding agents to plan, generate, review, and integrate work at high throughput.
- Excellent technical problem-solving skills and aptitude for learning new technologies.
- Crystal clear communicator in verbal and written form.
- Strong end-to-end accountability and a track record of taking delivery fully to completion.
- Clear ownership mindset - not someone who leaves delivery responsibility with another organization.
- Experience supervising a thin near/offshore team with partial bandwidth and driving work through closure across distributed teams.
- Scope control and management.
Desired Skills
- Experience with Apache Solr for search indexing and content discovery.
- Experience with Adobe Target, Analytics, and personalization strategies.
- Experience working with marketing teams on content and experience optimization.
- Experience with AEM as a Cloud Service and cloud deployment pipelines.
- Experience integrating AEM with headless/decoupled front-end architectures.
- Hands-on experience with e-commerce applications - conceptualizing, designing, building, and deploying solutions.
- Familiarity with mobile content delivery patterns.
- Experience with large-scale, multi-brand content platforms.
- Experience with JCR repository operations, JCR-SQL2 queries, and content migration.
- Familiarity with SonarQube, PMD, CheckStyle, and code quality gate enforcement.
- Experience with AI-assisted development tooling (coding agents, LLM-based code generation and review).