Sr. Forward Deployed Creative Technologist Manager

Role

Lead a team of Forward Deployed Creative Technologists (FDCTs) as a hands-on player-coach, splitting time roughly 50/50 between coding/customer-facing technical work and people management. Embed with strategic enterprise customers to build and ship AI-powered creative workflows using Adobe Firefly and Adobe workflow tooling.

Key Responsibilities

• Stay hands-on: write production code regularly and take the hardest customer engagements alongside your team.
• Lead customer-facing engagements with senior stakeholders (CMOs, creative directors, heads of IT) and translate technical solutions into ROI and renewals.
• Manage performance: run 1:1s, set expectations, execute promotions, redirects or exits, and document decisions.
• Grow and develop the team: hire, coach, promote, and raise the bar across engagements and bench strength.
• Build reusable playbooks, templates, and workflow nodes to accelerate future pods.
• Manage vendors and contractors, ensuring quality and rotating partners when necessary.
• Feed product and engineering with field signal to influence what gets built next.

Requirements

• 8–12 years combined experience in creative production and technical building, with shipped creative work (motion, design, video, 3D, photography, brand systems) and shipped technical work (apps, integrations, plugins, automation).
• Production code within the last 6 months; must remain hands-on with engineering work.
• Demonstrated management craft with evidence: hiring ICs, running PIPs, promotion decisions, coaching out, and concrete growth outcomes for 2–3 ICs.
• Meta-management and cross-geo experience: have hired and developed at least 2 managers and run teams across geographies (India + US, ideally EMEA too).
• Fluency in creative content supply chains and tooling (how briefs become assets, design tokens, master files to channel variants, handoffs through Figma/PSD/INDD to DAM and review flows).
• Fluency with Adobe Firefly Services, Firefly Creative Production / Workflow Builder; familiarity with Adobe ecosystem (AEM, Workfront, Frame.io, App Builder) and Figma plugin/APIs is a strong plus.
• Vibe-coding experience and daily AI-tooling use (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot); be able to name tools, wins, and limitations.
• Must provide a public portfolio (link or PDF) showing personally shipped creative and technical work; applications without a portfolio will not be reviewed.
• Willingness to travel ~15–25%.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a pure people manager (no production code in 18+ months) nor a senior IC without management track record.
• Not a product manager, program manager, or consultant role: leaders on this team both write code and produce creative work.

Notes

• The role emphasizes measurable customer impact (time saved, dollars earned, campaigns shipped) and extreme ownership of outcomes.
• Adobe provides standard employee benefits (refer to company benefits) and accommodations for candidates with disabilities during recruiting.