Manager, Applied Research

Adobe

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
San Jose, CASeattle, WASan Francisco, CA
Salary
$224,100–$324,450 / yr
Posted
15 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $217k
This role $274k
$148k most similar roles pay here $343k

This role pays more than 82% of similar roles. Most pay $177,250–$256,137 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $274k versus about $217k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Adobe

Adobe Inc. is a global software company known for creative and multimedia software products including Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and its cloud-based Creative Cloud and Document Cloud suites. Industry: Creative & Digital Experience Software

Adobe currently has 218 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $187,100–$270,950 across 216 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

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At a glance

TL;DR · Manager, Applied Research

As Manager, Applied Research, you will join the Adobe Firefly Foundry team as a technical and strategic steward of generative-AI platforms for media and entertainment enterprises. You will lead and grow a distributed team to translate state-of-the-art research into production-ready capabilities while defining strategies to solve customer problems through multi-modal content generation. Your daily responsibilities include building scalable data, pre-training, and post-training pipelines across the machine learning model lifecycle, ensuring data diversity, and implementing ethical AI practices. You will utilize expertise in computer vision, multimedia, and creative content ecosystems to manage large-scale image and video datasets. The role requires deep knowledge of ML data lifecycles, including governance, versioning, and annotation platforms, to solve complex problems regarding brand safety and workflow efficiency for professional-grade generative models within the Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud environments.

What you'll do

  • Lead and grow a distributed team focused on Generative AI research and development.
  • Define and execute strategies to solve customer problems using Generative AI technologies.
  • Enable controllable and precise multi-modal content generation for professional use cases.
  • Build and maintain scalable data, pre-training, and post-training pipelines across the ML lifecycle.
  • Evaluate and integrate tools and methodologies to improve infrastructure and workflows.
  • Champion data diversity, bias mitigation, and ethical AI practices within the organization.
  • Translate state-of-the-art research into production-ready capabilities for Adobe platforms.

What we're looking for

  • Ph.D. in CS, Data Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or related field, or equivalent experience.
  • 10+ years of experience in engineering and research leadership for ML models.
  • Deep understanding of ML data lifecycles, specifically for modern generative models.
  • Expertise in data quality, governance, versioning, and annotation platforms.
  • Strong grasp of data privacy, security, and ethical AI principles.
  • Experience with large-scale image/video datasets and training generative models.
  • Preferred experience with computer graphics, VFX pipelines, or creative content ecosystems.
  • Proven track record of contributions to open-source tools, publications, or patents in ML and computer vision.

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