Principal Scientist - Applied Research in Multimodal Foundation Models

Principal Scientist - Applied Research, ASML (Multimodal Foundation Models)

About Us:

Adobe Firefly is the industry's premier generative AI model family, built to be safe for commercial use and deeply embedded into the workflows of millions of creators.

The Opportunity:

We are looking for a Principal Scientist of Applied Research for our Applied Science and Machine Learning (ASML) in India. This organization is responsible for scaling, quality, and innovation in multimodal training data—spanning image, video, and audio—that powers Adobe Firefly’s foundational generative and editing models.

The Multimodal Data Research organization sets the data foundation for Firefly’s multimodal intelligence, owning first‑party strategy and execution across ingestion, filtering, captioning, generation and editing‑centric datasets, data‑driven training experiments, and next‑generation data frameworks. By grounding model training in high‑quality, diverse, and workflow‑authentic data, the team directly builds Firefly’s creative capabilities.

What You’ll Do:

Multimodal Model Training: Guide the Applied Research team on architecture and training strategies for models that bridge text, pixels, temporal frames, and audio waveforms.

Cross-Modal Data Ablations: Pioneer our approach to data ablations across diverse modalities. You will build rigorous experiments to understand how dataset composition, cross-modal alignment (e.g., text-to-video, image-to-audio), pruning, and blending impact final model capabilities and commercial viability.

Research Leadership: Guide a world-class team of applied scientists and ML researchers, encouraging rapid experimentation, deep scientific rigor, and groundbreaking progress in multimodal representation learning.

Scale & Infrastructure: Partner closely with Core Engineering and Infrastructure teams to optimize distributed training pipelines across massive GPU clusters, ensuring efficient resource utilization and training stability for complex multimodal workloads.

Bridge Research to Product: Translate ground breaking AI research into production-ready foundation models that power Adobe's flagship tools (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, GenStudio).

Global Collaboration: Collaborate with global AI research leaders, data engineering teams, and legal/trust teams to ensure our models remain the industry standard for commercial safety and creative quality.

What You Need to Succeed:

• Research & Engineering Leadership: 10+ years of experience in Applied Machine Learning or AI Research, and at least 4+ years mentoring and scaling high-performing research teams.

• Multimodal Foundation Model Expertise: Hands-on experience training models that process multiple modalities (e.g., Diffusion Transformers (DiT), Multimodal LLMs, joint embedding architectures like CLIP, or generative video/audio models) from scratch.

• Proficiency in Multimodal Data: Experience crafting and delivering data ablation studies. You understand how to balance diverse datasets, handle varying data ingestion rates, curate high-quality multimodal pairs, and manage multi-objective training.

• Distributed Training at Scale: Architectural understanding of training massive models using frameworks like PyTorch, Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, or FSDP. You know how to troubleshoot loss spikes, gradients, and cluster bottlenecks specific to multimodal architectures.

• Scientific Rigor: Turning ambiguous research questions into structured experiments with measurable outcomes.

• Education: PhD or MS in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a closely related highly quantitative field, or equivalent experience.

Adobe is an equal opportunity employer. We hire dedicated individuals, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, ancestry, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, cultural background or religious beliefs. We know that when our employees feel appreciated and included, they can be more creative, innovative and successful. This is what it means to be Adobe For All. Learn more about our vision here.

About Adobe

Adobe 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 together

At 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 accommodations@adobe.com or call +1 408-536-3015. 

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.

 

Experience Level

Senior Level