Sr. Director, Applied AI/ML (Discovery)

Adobe Inc.
United States, California, San Jose
345 Park Avenue (Show on map)
Apr 30, 2025
Our Company Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe's 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, and transform 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 access to 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: Search, Discovery and Content Intelligence (SDC) technology is a critical part of Adobe's products capabilities - offering AI-powered Search, Browse, Recommendations, RAG assistive workflow capabilities, and conversational agents. Adobe's products are all about creating amazing multimedia and multimodal rich content. Creative professionals, enterprise users, and novice users alike need quick access to their digital assets, ingredients, style libraries, and the wide variety of creative content they work with every day, from brushes to colors, images, design assets, videos, audio and beyond. Users need to discover contextually inspirational rich media content, assets their teams have created or from Stock digital marketplaces, Adobe community content and more. The SDC team powers Search, Recommendation and Assistive experiences in flagship Adobe products, including Adobe Express, Stock, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Acrobat, and Adobe.com. We focus on developing innovative AI-powered search, recommendations, and assistive experiences using generative AI technologies across all modalities, including text, image, videos, and creating industry-leading experiences to improve creative efficiency for creators, marketers, and designers. We leverage and fine-tune LLMs, vLLMs, transformers, vector search and RAG, transformer relevance models, and neural agents to build our state-of-the-art technology stack. We are looking for a Senior Director of Applied AI/ML (Discovery) with deep domain experience in information retrieval (IR), recommender systems, query understanding and intent AI, LLMs, relevance AI, image and language understanding, data mining, search funnel data analysis and metrics, and search UX. What you will do: Lead a large team of managers, applied machine learning scientists, data scientists, and search engineers to drive business impact. Top-notch leadership experience to collaborate with partner and stakeholder teams, PM, Research and other applied research leaders across Adobe to drive value. Leadership experience in cross-functional organizations. Provide thought leadership to craft innovative capabilities to cater to product users' increasing needs and expectations. Bringing AI and technology depth to build and sustain AI foundational models for users' needs. Ability to deliver business results for the top of the funnel experiences through conversion, and engagement. What you need to succeed: Expertise in building large scale search and recommendation systems. Deep expertise in LLM and GenAI technology. Hands on experience and expertise in building AI foundational models for intent understanding, multimedia content understanding, language understanding, and state-of-the-art relevance ML models. Experience in assistant or conversational systems preferred. 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 $201,100 -- $429,100 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. 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. Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunityemployer. 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 applicable characteristics protected by law. Learn more. Adobe aims to make Adobe.com 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.comor call (408) 536-3015.