Sr. Manager, Applied Machine Learning

The Opportunity

Within Adobe's SDC (Search, Discovery, and Content AI) division, we aim to enhance customers' digital journeys through semantic and visual search, rich browse experiences, recommendations, and conversational search. Our focus is on machine learning and AI in information retrieval, covering query intent and content comprehension, as well as the ranking and scoring of creative assets and professional documents. This encompasses personal, team, and enterprise content, along with public marketplace assets. We are advancing our AI ecosystem by integrating search and recommendations with LLMs, diffusion models, and Adobe's domain expertise.

We are looking for a talented individual to invent our AI/ML approach, bringing to bear advanced deep learning and NLP techniques to construct user-friendly systems.

What you will do

• Guide, coach, and develop a top-performing group of ML engineers and data scientists.
• Define the technical roadmap, set priorities, and guide the development of high-impact ML solutions in relevance, query understanding, and personalization.
• Develop strong cross-functional partnerships with product, research and engineering teams to build the product vision, ML strategy, engineering roadmap, and execution plans.
• Coordinate all aspects of the ML product lifecycle, including model development, data/ML pipelines, quality evaluation, and deployment.
• Ensure standard methodologies in MLOps, cloud deployment, and system integration for scalable, reliable applications.
• Foster a team culture grounded in rigorous scientific methods, deep customer understanding, and continuous innovation.
• Drive an engineering culture that values creativity, high-quality delivery, and operational excellence.
• Proactively manage project scope, mitigate risks, and solve complex problems using data-driven insights.
• Maintain engineering excellence in architecture, execution, and delivery.
• Stay on top of AI/ML advancements, fostering experimentation, learning, and embracing innovative techniques.

Basic Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, ML, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent technical experience.
• At least 8 years of industry experience in machine learning, optimization algorithms, and/or deep-learning techniques.
• A track record of leading a team of ML and AI engineers for at least 3 years is required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in creative fields (such as design, media, or content platforms), particularly in applying AI to improve search, discovery, and personalization.
• Strong background in modern NLP, including query understanding, intent modeling, semantic search, and multimodal interaction.
• Hands-on experience with Large Language Models (LLMs), Diffusion Models, and other generative AI techniques.
• Established record of building and growing large-scale, high-functioning ML systems for production use.

What You Need to Succeed

• Demonstrating proven success in delivering ML-powered products at scale using foundation models and large data pipelines.
• Skilled at translating business needs into AI/ML solutions and taking innovations from research to production.
• Strong coding expertise (Python, Java) and experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, and cloud-scale systems.
• Experienced leader encouraging innovation, collaboration, and high-performing engineering teams.
• Outstanding communicator, capable of simplifying complex concepts and encourage cross-functional alignment.
• Deep customer focus with a track record of driving adoption and continuous product improvement.