Principal AI Systems Engineer — C++ / Applied AI
Adobe · San Jose, California ·
- Seniority
- Principal
- Category
- AI engineering
- Experience
- 10+ years
Adobe · San Jose, California ·
The Opportunity
We are looking for a Principal AI Systems Engineer with deep C++ expertise to help build the next generation of AI-enabled product and platform capabilities.
This role sits at the intersection of large-scale systems engineering, applied AI, and production software architecture. You will design and build the native infrastructure, service integration layers, evaluation systems, and reliability mechanisms that allow AI-powered features to operate safely, predictably, and efficiently inside complex software products.
This is not a research-only role and not a prompt-engineering role. This is a hands-on principal engineering role for someone who can move between architecture, production code, AI system design, technical strategy, and cross-team leadership.
The ideal candidate is a strong C++ engineer first, with practical AI fluency: someone who understands how modern AI systems behave, where they fail, how to integrate them into production workflows, and how to design systems that make AI useful, reliable, observable, and secure.
What You’ll Do
AI-Native Systems Architecture
Design and build native C++ infrastructure that connects complex product codebases to AI-powered services, agents, and model-backed workflows.
Define clean execution interfaces, schemas, validation layers, and error-handling contracts for AI-driven actions.
Create reliable bridges between product capabilities, AI orchestration systems, and backend services.
Ensure AI-initiated actions behave safely, predictably, and consistently within existing product workflows.
Guide long-term architecture decisions through ADRs, design documents, technical reviews, and cross-functional alignment.
C++ Platform and Integration Engineering
Build high-quality C++ components for performance-sensitive, cross-platform environments.
Own critical client-side infrastructure such as service connectivity, session lifecycle, authentication, TLS, reconnection, concurrency, and async execution.
Design APIs and abstractions that are maintainable, testable, and scalable across multiple product surfaces.
Improve code health through modernization, refactoring, better testing, and stronger engineering patterns.
Balance performance, memory safety, reliability, backward compatibility, and developer experience in a mature codebase.
Applied AI Reliability and Evaluation
Design systems that make AI features measurable, debuggable, and production-ready.
Build evaluation frameworks for AI workflows, including automated task execution, output validation, regression testing, scoring, and human review loops.
Define guardrails for AI-driven actions, including safety checks, capability boundaries, fallback paths, and failure handling.
Create privacy-conscious tracing, observability, and diagnostics for model-backed systems.
Partner with product, data science, security, legal, and AI governance teams to ensure AI capabilities meet quality, safety, and compliance expectations.
Technical Leadership
Act as a technical lead across teams building AI-powered product infrastructure.
Set engineering direction in ambiguous and fast-moving technical areas.
Influence architecture across native clients, backend AI services, orchestration layers, and product experience teams.
Mentor senior engineers and raise the quality bar for AI systems, C++ engineering, and production reliability.
Help teams adopt AI-assisted engineering workflows for code generation, debugging, testing, documentation, and review.
What You’ll Bring
Required Qualifications
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in C++.
Strong experience building or maintaining large, mature, performance-sensitive codebases.
Expertise in modern C++ design, memory management, concurrency, API design, debugging, and systems-level performance.
Experience building cross-platform software across Windows, macOS, Linux, or similar environments.
Hands-on experience integrating AI, LLMs, agents, or model-backed systems into production or production-adjacent software.
Practical understanding of AI system failure modes, including hallucination, tool-calling errors, incomplete context, multi-turn drift, nondeterminism, and unreliable outputs.
Experience designing reliable interfaces between AI systems and deterministic software systems.
Strong systems architecture skills, including tradeoff analysis, technical strategy, and architecture documentation.
Experience with testing at scale, including unit tests, integration tests, CI validation, regression testing, and quality gates.
Ability to lead through influence across engineering, product, design, platform, security, and data science teams.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions to both engineering and executive audiences.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with frontier model APIs such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, or similar systems.
Experience designing tool/function-calling interfaces, agentic workflows, or AI orchestration systems.
Experience building AI evaluation frameworks, automated scoring systems, or human-in-the-loop quality review.
Familiarity with JSON-RPC, gRPC, WebSockets, REST, or similar service protocols.
Experience with observability and tracing for AI systems or distributed systems.
Experience with privacy-aware telemetry, data retention, secure client/service communication, or enterprise compliance requirements.
Familiarity with sandboxing, safety boundaries, permissions, or policy enforcement for AI-initiated actions.
Experience modernizing legacy C++ systems or improving developer productivity in large engineering organizations.
Background in creative tools, productivity applications, developer tools, enterprise software, or complex desktop applications.
What Makes This Role Special
You will help define how AI becomes a reliable part of complex production software systems.
You will work at the intersection of C++ systems engineering, applied AI, platform architecture, and product-scale impact.
You will shape infrastructure that enables AI-powered experiences across multiple teams and product surfaces.
You will influence both technical strategy and day-to-day engineering execution.
You will help raise the bar for how teams build, evaluate, secure, and operate AI systems in production.
About the Team
This team builds foundational AI systems and native infrastructure for product engineering teams. We partner across client engineering, backend AI services, platform teams, product, data science, security, privacy, and release engineering.
We focus on durable architecture, production-quality implementation, measurable reliability, and practical AI adoption. Our goal is to make AI-powered software safer, faster, more capable, and easier for engineering teams to build and ship.
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 [email protected] 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 $190,200 -- $360,500 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 $248,900 - $360,500 In New York, the pay range for this position is $248,900 - $360,500 In Illinois, the pay range for this position is $219,500 - $317,775 In Washington, the pay range for this position is $246,400 - $356,800
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.