Chief Architect for Adobe Intelligence Platform
Adobe · San Jose ·
- Seniority
- C level
- Category
- Architecture
- Experience
- 3+ years
Adobe · San Jose ·
Adobe Intelligence Platform is the foundational AI infrastructure that powers agentic experiences across the Adobe product portfolio. The platform enables interoperability of agents, capabilities, and workflows across the Adobe Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud, Document Clouds, and future product lines. It is the connective tissue that transforms Adobe from a suite of best-in-class tools into a unified, AI-native ecosystem.
This platform encompasses agentic orchestration, model gateway infrastructure, knowledge graph services, semantic memory systems, MCP registries, skill and capability catalogs, and the planning and reasoning layers that enable autonomous and semi-autonomous workflows at enterprise scale.
We are seeking a Sr. Principal Architect to serve as the technical leader and chief decision-maker for the Adobe Intelligence Platform engineering team. You will lead a team of architects and senior engineers responsible for designing, building, and evolving the platform that unlocks AI-native interoperability across every Adobe product.
This is not a strategy-only role. You will be hands-on in defining system boundaries, authoring architecture decision records, reviewing critical code paths, and setting the technical bar for the entire organization. You will own the long-range technical vision while driving execution on near-term deliverables with a bias toward production-quality, resilient systems.
You will report to the VP of AI Platform Engineering and work closely with product leadership, applied research, and engineering teams across all Adobe business units.
Platform Architecture Leadership: Own the end-to-end technical architecture for Adobe Intelligence Platform, including agentic orchestration, model gateways, MCP registries, knowledge graph infrastructure, semantic memory, skill catalogs, and planning and reasoning layers.
Agentic Systems Design: Architect multi-agent harnesses that orchestrate agent lifecycle management, inter-agent communication protocols, capability discovery, delegation, and compositional planning across heterogeneous agent runtimes.
Agent, MCP and Skills Registries: Design and scale a common Adobe registry for agents, MCP (Model Context Protocol) client/servers, skill and capability catalogs, and gateway infrastructure that enables secure, discoverable, and composable tool and service integrations across product boundaries.
Knowledge Graph & Memory Systems: Lead the design of knowledge graph infrastructure and agentic memory systems (episodic, semantic, procedural) that enable agents to reason over structured and unstructured knowledge with low-latency retrieval and contextual grounding.
LLM Infrastructure & Model Gateway: Architect the model abstraction, routing, and gateway layer that supports multi-model orchestration with circuit breakers, progressive rollouts, automated rollback, and cost-aware routing across proprietary and open-weight models.
Safety, Governance and Trust. Partner closely with Security, Privacy and Legal colleagues to ensure the platform has observability, security, and enterprise governance controls around safety and trust built into the end-to-end architecture.
Resilience & Production Excellence: Establish platform-wide standards for fault tolerance, observability, chaos engineering, progressive deployments, and automated recovery. Ensure every component is designed with the assumption that any dependency can fail at any time.
Technical Decision Making: Serve as the final technical authority on architecture decisions, technology selection, and build-vs-buy evaluations. Author and maintain Technical Decision Documents (TDDs) and ensure decisions are well-documented, reversible where possible, and grounded in measurable criteria.
Team Leadership & Mentorship: Lead and mentor a global team of architects and principal engineers. Establish architectural review processes, technical standards, and a culture of rigorous engineering that values quality, security, and maintainability.
Cross-Product Integration: Partner with engineering leadership across Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Document Cloud to ensure seamless integration of AI platform capabilities into existing and future product workflows.
Security & Trust Architecture: Champion security-by-design principles including zero-trust networking, post-quantum cryptographic readiness, supply chain integrity, and data governance across all platform services.
15+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in a principal+ or distinguished architect role leading platform-scale systems.
Deep expertise in modern AI architectures including LLM serving, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic orchestration, multi-model routing, and gateway design.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with strong fundamentals in consensus, partitioning, consistency models, and failure domain isolation.
Expert-level knowledge of agentic AI patterns including planning and reasoning engines, tool use and function calling, skills, rules, agentic memory architectures, capability discovery, and multi-step workflow orchestration.
Strong background in resilient system design including circuit breakers, bulkheads, backpressure mechanisms, progressive deployments, automated rollbacks, and chaos engineering practices.
Production experience with modern systems languages (Rust, Go, Python, TypeScript) and a strong preference for type-safe, memory-safe toolchains.
Experience designing and scaling API gateway and service mesh architectures with sophisticated routing, rate limiting, and observability.
Track record of leading and mentoring teams of senior architects and engineers in fast-moving, high-stakes environments.
BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
Direct experience building or leading MCP (Model Context Protocol) infrastructure, registries, or gateway systems at scale.
Contributions to open-source AI infrastructure projects or published research in agentic systems, knowledge representation, or distributed AI architectures.
Experience operating AI platforms that serve hundreds of millions of end users across multiple product lines.
Hands-on experience with knowledge graph technologies (RDF/OWL, property graphs, vector stores, hybrid retrieval) and their application to enterprise-scale semantic search and contextual grounding.
Expertise in streaming data architectures (Kafka, Flink, Pulsar) and event-driven system design for real-time agentic workflows.
Deep understanding of AI safety, alignment, and responsible AI frameworks as they apply to autonomous agent systems deployed at enterprise scale.
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.
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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 $209,900 -- $432,450 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 $278,100 - $432,450

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.