Lead Backend Software Architect

Software Development Engineer 5 (Architect)

JOB LEVEL

P50

EMPLOYEE ROLE

Individual Contributor

The Adobe Experience Cloud (https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud.html) is a $3B+ business serving enterprise customers, including over 95% of Fortune 500 organizations.

Marketo Engage, AJOB2B , part of Adobe Experience Cloud, is a leading marketing automation platform that empowers businesses to orchestrate personalized customer engagement at scale. Marketo provides capabilities across campaign management, lead nurturing, customer journey orchestration, analytics, and real-time engagement, enabling enterprises to deliver impactful digital experiences across channels.

About the Role

We are seeking a Lead Backend major , full stack Architect to join the Marketo Engineering team and help shape the next generation of scalable backend platform capabilities. This role focuses on designing and building highly scalable, reliable, and intelligent backend systems that power enterprise-scale marketing automation workloads handling billions of customer interactions and events.

This role goes beyond feature development—you will define architectural direction, influence engineering standards, and drive AI-first innovation across teams while acting as a recognized technical leader.

What You’ll Do

Architecture, Platform & Innovation

• Own and drive end-to-end architecture and development for core backend platform components, influencing foundational architecture and long-term technical strategy.

• Design scalable distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, and event-driven architectures capable of supporting enterprise-scale workloads.

• Lead architecture and design reviews, providing expert mentorship and constructive feedback to improve system quality, scalability, and resilience.

• Drive AI-first platform solutions, incorporating AI/ML capabilities into backend services to enable intelligent automation, optimization, and personalization.

• Innovate and contribute breakthrough ideas, evaluating and promoting adoption across products and engineering teams.

• Define and evolve architectural patterns, backend engineering standards, and platform guidelines across organizations.

Engineering Execution & Platform Development

• Lead development of complex, high-impact backend services and platform capabilities.

• Establish and enforce coding standards, testing strategies, observability practices, and automation frameworks to improve scalability, reliability, and maintainability.

• Drive AI-enabled engineering practices to improve developer productivity and software quality.

• Own DevOps lifecycle end-to-end: development, CI/CD, deployment automation, monitoring, observability, and production reliability.

• Refactor and modernize legacy systems to improve performance, scalability, and operational efficiency.

• Drive performance optimization, fault tolerance, security, and high availability across backend systems.

Leadership & Cross-Team Influence

• Act as a technical leader across business units, influencing platform strategy, engineering practices, and architectural decisions.

• Lead cross-team technical discussions, synthesizing diverse viewpoints into scalable and maintainable solutions.

• Partner with architects, product managers, and engineering leaders to define long-term technical vision and roadmap.

• Influence hiring decisions and contribute to building a high-performing engineering organization.

Encouraging Collaboration & Providing Guidance

• Mentor engineers across levels on backend architecture, distributed systems, scalability, and engineering excellence.

• Actively contribute through internal technical talks, architecture reviews, blogs, and engineering forums.

• Encourage and guide contributions to technical papers, conferences, and industry discussions.

Ownership & Execution

• Operate as a self-directed technical leader, handling ambiguous and complex problem spaces.

• Drive initiatives independently while guiding peers and junior engineers.

• Provide clear technical summaries, architectural recommendations, and strategic insights to leadership.

Requirements

• B.Tech / M.Tech in Computer Science (or equivalent) from a premier institute.

• 12+ years of software development experience with strong expertise in backend platform engineering and distributed systems architecture.

• Deep understanding of scalable system architecture, microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, and cloud-native platform design.

• Strong expertise in Java, Scala, Go, Python, or similar backend technologies.

• Experience with distributed data systems, messaging platforms, caching, and large-scale data processing architectures.

• Strong understanding of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP and modern DevOps practices.

• Proven experience leading complex technical initiatives and influencing cross-team architecture.

• Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, software design principles, and backend engineering best practices.

• Experience or strong inclination toward AI-powered product capabilities and AI-assisted engineering practices.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor, lead, and grow engineering talent.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical ideas clearly.

Why This Role

This is a high-impact role where you will:

• Influence core backend architecture powering enterprise-scale marketing automation

• Drive AI-first transformation in platform and backend engineering

• Work on systems handling billions of customer interactions and events every week

• Build the future of customer engagement technology at Adobe

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