Adobe

Sr Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Media Intelligence

Adobe
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7 days ago
Seattle, WA, USA +3 moreStaff+
H1B Sponsor

Base Salary

$190k - $346k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Design and build large-scale batch and streaming data-processing pipelines for multimedia assets and model-derived signals.
  • Set the technical vision and architecture for Firefly Foundry’s media-intelligence data platform and search stack.
  • Architect hybrid lexical, vector, multimodal, and cross-modal retrieval with ranking, reranking, faceting, and metadata filtering.
  • Build retrieval interfaces for AI agents, including tool/function-call retrieval, multi-hop planning, iterative retrieval, grounding, citations, and provenance.
  • Own incremental and streaming indexing, backfills, reprocessing, schema versioning, and embedding-model versioning.
  • Engineer enterprise capabilities including per-tenant index isolation, data residency, access controls, and audit support.
  • Define retrieval quality gates, offline and online evaluation, regression detection, and drift monitoring.
  • Own latency, throughput, freshness, recall, availability, and cost targets, including ANN tuning and accelerator capacity.
  • Build deployment, observability, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and postmortem practices for data and search systems.
  • Lead cross-team design and build-versus-buy decisions, mentor senior engineers, and represent the platform architecture to leadership and partner organizations.

Requirements

  • 10+ years of experience in machine learning, data, or infrastructure engineering, including deep ownership of production-scale data processing and/or search and retrieval systems.
  • Deep expertise with search and retrieval infrastructure, including vector/ANN retrieval, lexical search, hybrid retrieval, ranking, reranking, and query understanding.
  • Strong data-engineering foundations in large-scale batch and streaming pipelines, data modeling, object stores, vector databases, and columnar or OLAP storage.
  • Experience building retrieval for LLM and agentic systems, including RAG, multimodal and cross-modal search, grounding, provenance, and retrieval evaluation.
  • Strong Python skills; Go, Rust, or C++ systems-language experience is a plus.
  • Hands-on familiarity with embedding models and their inference paths, including PyTorch.
  • Experience building observability, monitoring, and alerting for data and search systems with freshness, recall, and latency SLAs.
  • Experience with multi-tenant systems and data isolation in enterprise or regulated environments.
  • Fluency with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and AWS or Azure.
  • Ability to reason about retrieval quality across text, image, video, 3D, and audio modalities.
  • Proven technical leadership through mentoring, cross-organization architecture work, build-versus-buy decisions, roadmap influence, and standards setting.
  • Excellent communication and data-driven problem-solving skills, including communication with leadership.
  • MS or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience building and operating large-scale data and search systems.

Benefits

  • Non-sales roles are eligible for Adobe’s Annual Incentive Plan.
  • Certain roles may be eligible for a long-term new-hire equity award.
  • Adobe provides comprehensive benefits programs and accessibility accommodations during the recruiting process.

Tech Stack

Categories

BackendData Engineering
Adobe

About Adobe

10,000+ employees

Adobe empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life. From creators and students to small businesses, global enterprises, and nonprofit organizations — customers choose Adobe products to ideate, collaborate, be more productive, drive business growth, and build remarkable experiences.

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