Senior Manager - Applied ML Research

Senior Engineering Manager, Applied Research - 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. The AI Foundations group sits at the core of this vision, driving innovation to make Adobe Express smarter, faster, and more adaptive!  

We are looking for a Senior Manager to lead and grow the Machine Learning team in India, bringing the latest and greatest from the existing literature into our AI stack spanning Agentic AI, Imaging AI, Motion AI, and Personalization AI, while developing the team members who help us deliver these artifacts. 

What You'll Do 

Technical direction and delivery  

• Drive ML projects involving building innovative machine learning models that drive Agentic and other Generative AI scenarios for Adobe Express. 

• Own the ML lifecycle—from ideation and prototyping to evaluation and deployment. 

• Contribute to foundational AI systems for orchestration, layout automation, image generation, and motion storytelling. 

• Define and implement evaluation strategies using a combination of automated metrics, LLM based judges, and user feedback. 

• Be a technical leader withing the wider Express AI Foundations leadership, helping to make the right technical investments. 

Cross-functional partnership 

• Collaborate with other cross-geo ML teams within Express to drive innovation and alignment. 

• Align with Engineering and PM partners to ensure product focus. 

• Drive collaboration with Adobe Research to translate ideas into production-ready capabilities. 

Team leadership and people development 

• Lead and mentor a team of 5 - 6 ML engineers, providing technical direction and encouraging a strong culture of innovation and experimentation. 

• 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.  

Basic Qualifications 

• 3–5 years of ML Engineering / Applied Science management experience, with a track record of delivering complex infrastructure or platform projects through a team.  

• Experience owning team execution end-to-end — including structured prioritization across competing workstreams, dependency management, and shipping reliably in an agile, fast paced environment. Can articulate trade-off decisions clearly, not just make them.  

• Clear, structured communication skills — able to translate technical trade-offs into business terms for PMs and non-technical partners, 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.  

• Experience shipping models in production at scale. 

• Strong understanding of current ML literature in multi-modal reasoning space — sufficient to guide technical decisions, set a quality bar, and grow team capability.  

• Demonstrated ability to grow engineers: mentoring, setting expectations, giving actionable feedback, and supporting career progression at multiple levels.  

Preferred Qualifications 

• Masters, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related field with equivalent experience. 

• Experience with model adaptation techniques (Ex: PEFT, SFT, RL etc.)  

• Familiarity with agent-based systems, intelligent assistants, or planner-based AI.  

• Experience in creative, imaging, or multimedia domains.  

• Publications in renowned ML/CV/AI conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, SIGGRAPH). 

What You Need to Succeed 

• Passionate about leading and growing team members! 

• Be a leader with a point of view and a passion for creativity, striving to improve solutions. 

• Be up to date with the latest and greatest in AI Research. 

• Comfortable working in a fast, iterative and ambiguous environment. 

• Collaborative spirit with a focus on product impact, AI / ML innovation and engineering excellence.