Customer Facing Software Architect (San Jose)

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, GraphQL, gRPC). Advanced proficiency in Data Architecture, capable of designing high-throughput persistence layers and defining data models across Relational, NoSQL, 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 scalable deployments. AdTech/MarTech Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with Digital Marketing concepts such as Real-Time Bidding (RTB), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), or personalization engines. Legacy Modernization: A track record of successfully migrating monolithic legacy systems to microservices or cloud-native architectures (the Strangler Fig pattern). Open Source Leadership: Active contributions to open-source projects or a history of speaking at technical conferences/meetups. This role is eligible for bonus and equityAbout AdobeAdobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s industry-leading offerings including Adobe Acrobat Studio, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, and GenStudio enable people and businesses to turn ideas into impact, powered by AI and driven by human ingenuity.Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours. Let’s Adobe togetherAt Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. Learn more.Adobe aims to make our Careers website and recruiting process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email View email address on apply.placed-app.com or call View phone number on apply.placed-app.com. AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI — and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it’s restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.Expected Pay Range:Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several  U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $173,500 -- $331,050 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.

In California, the pay range for this position is $228,600 - $331,050
In Washington, the pay range for this position is $218,200 - $316,000
At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans. Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.State-Specific Notices:California:Fair Chance OrdinancesAdobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.Colorado:Application Window NoticeThere is no deadline to apply to this job posting because Adobe accepts applications for this role on an ongoing basis. The posting will remain open based on hiring needs and position availability.Massachusetts: Massachusetts Legal NoticeIt is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.SummaryLocation: San Jose; Seattle; San FranciscoType: Full time