Forward Deployed Architect

The Team:
You will be joining the newly formed Forward Deployment Engineering (FDE) team within Adobe's Digital Experience organization. As part of a key innovation initiative, our mandate is to bridge the gap between product engineering and real-world implementation. We are a team of world-class engineers dedicated to solving the most complex challenges for the world's largest companies, ensuring they extract maximum value from the Adobe ecosystem.

The Opportunity:

This is an opportunity to serve as a Strategic Technical Authority and architect the future of Adobe's product capabilities from the front lines. You will not just integrate existing software; you will architect and build new, production-grade product features that solve the most complex challenges for global industry leaders. As a Forward Deployment Architect, you will treat customer environments as the ultimate proving ground, identifying gaps in high-scale scenarios and engineering solutions that push the boundaries of what our platform can do.

You will act as the vital link between real-world requirements and Core Engineering, ensuring that the innovations you build today become the foundational standards of the Adobe ecosystem tomorrow.

What You'll Do:

* Architect and Define Solutions:
Own the end-to-end technical vision for complex implementation projects, translating ambiguous customer requirements into scalable, secure, and high-performance system architectures.

* Drive Technical Governance:
Establish and enforce design patterns, API specifications, and coding standards to ensure that solutions are not only functional but also maintainable and compliant with enterprise security policies.

* Lead Strategic Integration:
Design robust integration strategies between Adobe Experience Cloud and diverse client technology stacks (legacy systems, cloud-native apps, and third-party data platforms), ensuring seamless data flow and interoperability.

* Champion Operational Excellence:
Define the strategy for system observability, reliability, and high availability (HA/DR), guiding engineering teams to build "self-healing" and resilient production environments.

* Executive Technical Advisory:
Lead high-stakes architectural workshops with client stakeholders (up to C-level) to align technical roadmaps with business objectives and drive consensus on implementation strategies.

* Elevate Engineering Culture:
Serve as a technical authority and mentor for the wider FDE team, conducting design reviews and fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and best practices.

* Cross-Functional Collaboration:

Partner deeply with Product Management and Core Engineering to feedback field insights into the product roadmap, influencing the future design of Adobe's platform capabilities.

* Hands-on Prototyping:
While focused on architecture, maintain deep technical acuity by building proof-of-concepts (POCs) for novel use cases to de-risk complex technical decisions before wider implementation.

What You Bring:

* 12+ years of technical experience, with at least 5 years in a Solution or Systems Architecture role, preferably designing large-scale SaaS or enterprise software solutions.

* Mastery of the Java/JVM ecosystem and modern application frameworks (e.g., Spring Boot), with the ability to evaluate and select technology stacks based on long-term maintainability and performance trade-offs.

* Deep expertise in Distributed System Design, including microservices, Event-Driven Architectures (EDA), and complex API integration patterns (REST, Graph

QL, gRPC).

* Advanced proficiency in Data Architecture, capable of designing high-throughput persistence layers and defining data models across Relational, No

SQL, and Search platforms (e.g., Elasticsearch).

* Strong command of Cloud-Native principles and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) within major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

* Executive presence and communication skills:
The ability to translate complex technical concepts into business value for C-level executives and non-technical stakeholders.

* A strategic mindset for Security and Compliance, ensuring architectures adhere to SOC2, GDPR, and enterprise-grade security standards from day one.

* Comfortable with 10%-25% travel to build relationships with customers

Desired Extras:

* Technical Thought Leadership: A history of public technical communication, including speaking at major industry conferences, publishing technical white papers, or maintaining a widely-read engineering blog.

* Experience with the Adobe Ecosystem:
Prior experience architecting solutions involving Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, or Adobe Experience Platform (AEP).

* Big Data & Streaming Architectures: proven ability to design real-time data ingestion and processing pipelines using technologies like Apache Kafka, Spark, Flink, or Databricks.

* Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
Proficiency in defining infrastructure standards using Terraform, Ansible, or Helm, enabling reproducible and…