Senior Software Development Engineer, Agent Workflows, Firefly Boards

Adobe

Senior Software Development Engineer, Agent Workflows, Firefly Boards

San Jose, CA
Full Time
Paid
  • Responsibilities

    Our Company

    Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe is all about. We give everyone-from emerging artists to global brands-everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences! We're passionate about empowering people to create beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, transforming how companies interact with customers across every screen.

    We're on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has equal opportunity. We realize that new ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours!

    The Opportunity

    We're hiring a Senior Software Development Engineer to own the workflow layer for Firefly Boards' agentic capabilities. Boards is bringing agentic AI to the infinite canvas - long-running, multi-step operations that need to survive interruption, recover from failure, and behave predictably in production. The agent platform itself (server-side runtime, browser/server execution boundary, AIP integration) is owned by a Senior Staff partner. This role owns everything that runs on top of it.

    Firefly Boards is an AI-powered mood-boarding and ideation app that provides a non-linear infinite canvas. It enables a new generation of creatives to embrace generative AI and those who find the linear workflows of legacy software restrictive. Images and videos can be imported or generated using AI models and edited, remixed, iterated on, and organized flexibly, making it easier for artists to visualize and develop ideas on their own or in collaboration.

    What You'll Do

    This role has three primary areas of ownership and a few secondary responsibilities.

    Primary:

    - Design and build the workflows that drive Boards' agentic product.

    - Implement what the product needs, tune agent behavior for production use, and expand the agentic surface as new capabilities come online. This is the engineer who makes the workflows actually work.

    - Own the gates and guardrails on long-running tasks.

    - Design and build the safety, quality, and cost controls that wrap agent operations: when an agent can act autonomously, when it needs to pause or escalate, how it recovers from partial failure, how budgets and limits are enforced. Most production agent systems fail here; this work is what keeps Boards' from doing the same.

    - Design for survivability across interruption and resumption.** Build agent workflows so multi-step operations can be checkpointed, paused, resumed, and recovered cleanly across the time horizons Boards needs. Consume the contracts the platform exposes for these capabilities; the platform itself is not in scope.

    Secondary:

    - Partner with the Senior Staff engineer on shaping where the agentic product goes next. That engineer sets strategic direction; this role contributes workflow-level depth that informs what's actually feasible.

    - Contribute to evaluation infrastructure for agent quality, latency, and cost. Not the primary owner, but a meaningful contributor.

    - Stay current on the frontier of agentic systems and bring back what's worth adopting.

    How The Role Works

    This is a senior IC role on a small, high-density team. You hold the workflow side of Boards' agentic stack and partner closely with the Senior Staff engineer who holds the platform, strategy, and AIP relationship. Your job is to build well, push back on what you see from the workflow side, and bring the depth that makes the strategy real. The team is distributed across the US and Romania with meaningful daily overlap.

    Ideal Qualifications

    - Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science
    - 5+ years of product engineering experience, with significant ownership of production systems
    - Demonstrated recent depth in agentic systems, workflow runtimes, or comparable LLM-tool-using applications. Recency matters more than tenure here; the field is young
    - Strong backend systems intuition: state management, long-running operations, recovery from partial failure, observability. Has built and operated systems with these properties, not just consumed them
    - Proficient in TypeScript and Python
    - Track record of writing clean, testable code and contributing to a codebase that other engineers extend
    - Strong written and verbal communication. Comfortable shaping technical decisions in a team where senior peers will push back hard

    Preferred Qualifications

    - Experience with workflow orchestration runtimes for tool-using LLM applications (LangGraph or comparable)
    - Experience with production LLM systems: evaluation, observability, latency and cost optimization at the workflow level
    - Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent tool design patterns
    - Production Kubernetes experience as a consumer of a managed platform
    - Experience with real-time collaborative or multiplayer applications
    - Track record of using observability and analytics data to drive engineering decisions: instrumenting systems to answer the questions that matter, then acting on what comes back
    - Experience embracing AI-augmented engineering workflows and sophisticated orchestration of agents in the development process itself

    This role is US-based. San Francisco, San Jose, and New York are highly preferred for proximity to partner teams. Remote work will be considered for exceptional candidates.

    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 .

    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 positionis $173,500 -- $331,050 annually. Paywithin this range varies by work locationand 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

    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 Ordinances

    Adobe 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 Notice

    If this role is open to hiring in Colorado (as listed on the job posting), the application window will remain open until at least the date and time stated above in Pacific Time, in compliance with Colorado pay transparency regulations. If this role does not have Colorado listed as a hiring location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based on hiring needs.

    Massachusetts:

    Massachusetts Legal Notice

    It 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.