Engineering Manager, Express AI Foundations

The opportunity

Adobe Express enables everyone - individuals and large organizations alike - to produce impressive content effortlessly. The AI Foundations team builds the flexible, scalable AI framework that powers creativity at scale across design, imaging, motion, and personalization.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow a team of engineers building the AI infrastructure for Adobe Express. This early‑level people management role (M30) is well suited to someone with a strong engineering foundation who has been leading and managing teams for 3‑5 years and is looking to deepen their impact through the growth of others and the delivery of high‑consequence systems at scale.

• Own end‑to‑end delivery of AI infrastructure work streams—including LLM orchestration, inference services, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks—from planning through production.
• Maintain strong enough technical depth to participate in system design reviews, challenge architectural decisions, and unblock your team on complex problems.
• Work with your team to set and meet engineering quality standards: observability, fault tolerance, latency guarantees, security, and responsible AI practices—including bias awareness and data privacy for AI systems.
• Make deliberate, explicit calls on technical debt versus feature velocity, and hold the team accountable to those decisions.
• Develop and communicate a coherent technical roadmap for your area, balancing immediate delivery with sustainable long‑term architecture.

• Partner with product management and engineering leadership to decompose high‑level product requirements into concrete technical requirements—breaking ambiguous asks into scoped work streams with clear dependencies, effort estimates, and sequencing.
• Drive prioritization across competing demands—balancing new feature work, infrastructure investment, and reliability improvements with a clear, defensible rationale the team and stakeholders can align on.
• Collaborate with AI research, data science, and platform teams to integrate in‑house and third‑party models and APIs into production‑quality serving systems.
• Represent your team's work and direction to senior stakeholders—communicating progress, risks, and technical trade‑offs clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.

• Manage and grow a team of 6‑10 engineers across varying seniority levels, providing regular coaching, feedback, and career development support.
• Drive a strong hiring bar—own the full recruiting lifecycle for your team, from sourcing through offer, and help build an inclusive, high‑performing culture.
• Foster a collaborative, psychologically safe environment where engineers can do their best work and grow into senior and staff roles.

• 3‑5 years of engineering management experience, with a track record of delivering complex infrastructure or platform projects through a team.
• A strong technical foundation in distributed systems, AI/ML infrastructure, or large‑scale service development—enough to earn credibility with senior engineers and make sound architectural trade‑offs.
• Experience owning team execution end‑to‑end—including structured prioritization across competing work streams, dependency management, and shipping reliably in an agile, fast‑moving environment. Can articulate trade‑off decisions clearly.
• Clear, structured communication skills—able to translate technical trade‑offs into business terms for PMs and non‑technical stakeholders, and to influence direction without authority across teams.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity: defining scope, making decisions with incomplete information, and adapting plans quickly as systems and priorities evolve.
• Working fluency in modern AI/ML concepts—LLM orchestration, inference infrastructure, prompt engineering, AI output evaluation, and data pipelines—sufficient to guide technical decisions, set a quality bar, and grow team capability.
• Demonstrated ability to grow engineers: coaching, setting expectations, giving actionable feedback, and supporting career progression…