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The Opportunity

We are hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to lead the agentic platform work for Firefly Boards. Board is bringing agentic AI to the infinite canvas. This role builds the engineering layer that makes it possible. You'll partner closely with the team that defines what the agent does. They handle intelligence. You handle the foundation they build on.

What You'll Do

This role has three primary areas of ownership and a few secondary ones. The work spans the full stack. You will ship the smallest useful version of the API for each entry point, then grow it as Boards learns what works over the next six to twelve months.

Primary:

Design and lead the application API that exposes Boards' canvas and document model. Agent code uses this surface to read, edit, and reason about a board. The work is about the right grain of abstraction, clean ergonomics for multi-turn calls, and the rigor to grow the interface well over time. The most senior judgment in the role shows up here.
Build the sub-agent runtime that powers long-running design tasks. Pick the right architecture. Plug it into Adobe's chat service on one side and the Boards application on the other. Design the contract that skills use to spawn and supervise sub-agents. Make it reliable across many turns.
Lead the integration with Adobe's central AI org. Boards will be among the first tenants while their interfaces are still evolving. You will help define contracts where Boards needs services that do not yet exist in supported form. Cross-org partnership, not a one-off handoff.

Secondary:

Partner with the second engineer on this team. They will build out the skills, MCPs, and tool integrations that sit on the API you design.
Develop the long-term vision for how the Boards agent works with the wider Firefly portfolio. A single agent and shared context across apps is the direction. The path there is open.
Set up the observability and tracing that make agent runs debuggable. Define latency budgets across runtime, tools, and model calls. Get the stack to a place the team can operate at scale.

How The Role Works

This is a senior IC role, not a tech lead role. You set engineering direction for the agentic stack and partner across team and org boundaries to make the integration succeed. The intelligence team owns skills, prompts, tool design, model selection, and agent quality. You own the systems that make their work possible. The two roles are peers with shared accountability for the agent product working end to end.

Cross-team collaboration is a real part of this role. You'll work alongside the AI org, the Horizon application framework team, and the model and identity teams. You will operate without direct authority across orgs. The pace is iterative. Ship small, then grow.

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
Full stack depth: backend services and modern web client work in roughly equal measure. JavaScript or TypeScript, a modern declarative UI framework (React, Lit, Vue), and a server-side language
Track record of designing and growing a public or programmatic API surface for a real product. You have shipped an API, lived with it, and learned what to commit to and what to defer
Experience as an early tenant of an internal platform team. You have done the work of being an early customer and helping a central team evolve their offering from that position
Experience guiding software architecture and design across multiple teams or organizations
History of writing clean, testable code and building reusable components
Clear written and verbal communication. Comfortable guiding technical decisions in cross-team 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
Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent tool design patterns
Experience designing interfaces for agent or automation consumers, including questions of abstraction grain and multi-turn ergonomics
Experience with production LLM systems: evaluation, observability, latency optimization, and context engineering at the system level
Experience with real-time collaborative or multiplayer applications
Experience with image, video, or multimedia applications
Experience scaling and stabilizing large web applications
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 case by case.

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:

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.