Manager, Forward Deployed Creative Technologist

Every global brand is now a content factory - thousands of on-brand variations a quarter across static, video, and 3D, shipped in days not weeks. We embed with enterprise customers, learn their content supply chain end-to-end, and build the custom AI-powered workflows that get them there - on Adobe Firefly Services, Firefly Creative Production (our node-based workflow builder), and Adobe Brand Intelligence (ABI) for brand validation and compliance.

Here's the whole job: by the time your team arrives, the deal is signed - but the creatives and marketers who have to use what we sold never signed up for it. Nobody can mandate adoption; your team has to earn it, account after account, against people who already have tools they like. That's what makes an enterprise customer renew instead of churn - and you did it yourself before you ever managed anyone.

You lead from the front as a hands-on player-coach. About half your week, you're in the code, in customer rooms, and in demos. The other half, you hire people better than you, coach them to earn adoption the way you do, and make the bench sharper every quarter.

We are not pre-sales. We are not consultants. We are technical creators who ship - and who get used.

• Earn adoption - and build a team that does it again and again. When an engagement stalls - a dark stakeholder, a product gap, a roomful of skeptics - you've done this yourself, and you coach your ICs through it. When the strategic deal is at risk, you fly in. Your team measures itself in adoption and renewals, not features shipped.

• Stay hands-on. Take the hardest engagement alongside your team, write the reference workflow others learn from, and ship it yourself.

• Hire better than yourself, and grow them. Raise the bar with every hire. Run real 1:1s, set explicit expectations, and make the hard calls early - promote, redirect, or coach out - and document them. Every IC more capable in 12 months; name the specific move you made.

• Clear the blockers your team can't. Turn recurring product gaps into roadmap influence, chase cross-team dependencies until they move, and feed real field signal back to Adobe product and engineering.

• Build the playbook. Reusable patterns from your team's engagements become shared templates and upstream Workflow Builder nodes. The next pod moves faster because of what yours learned.

The bar - what we filter hardest for:

• You earn adoption against resistance - and you've done it yourself. Won over the user who didn't want your tool, found another way in when a stakeholder went dark, turned a roomful of skeptics into repeat users through the workshop or live build. When the strategic deal is at risk, you're the one who flies in. You measure yourself - and your team - in adoption and renewals, not features shipped.

• You build a team that does it again and again. You hire and coach for activation grit, not just craft. Turning a passive stakeholder into an excited repeat user isn't a one-off you pulled off once - it's the thing your whole bench does, account after account.

Hands-on - builder and creative, not just a manager:

• You still build it yourself. Production code in the last 6 months - and you'll be in it the next 6. If you've drifted into pure people management, this isn't your role.

• Creative content supply-chain craft. Briefs to assets, brand systems and design tokens, masters to channel variants, the Figma / PSD / INDD DAM review-and-approval handoff. You read your team's engagements at architect depth.

• A public portfolio (link or PDF at application) - shipped creative and technical work you personally did, not just managed. Hard requirement; no portfolio, no review.

Management craft - proven, with evidence:

• You hire, grow, and performance-manage for real. You've hired ICs, run PIPs, made promotion calls that stuck, navigated cross-functional conflict, coached someone out, and grown 2-3 ICs who are now more senior because of you. Names and specific moves on request.

• For the India Manager role: cross-geo fluency - you've run teams across geos (India + US, ideally EMEA) with a real grasp of the cost of bad cross-geo coordination.

Force multipliers - real, but teachable:

• Firefly Services, Firefly Creative Production, and Adobe Brand Intelligence fluency - you know what the field is hitting before your ICs tell you. Adobe ecosystem (AEM, Workfront, Frame.io, App Builder) and Figma plugin/API/MCP depth are pluses.

• AI-native building with judgment. You set the AI-native bar for your team - Cursor / Claude Code / Copilot daily, and you catch when the output is wrong. You explore the frontier (ComfyUI, n8n, LangGraph, MCPs) to stay sharp.

High EQ, low ego. 8-12 years straddling creative production and technical building. Travel 15-25%.

• Managers who ship features, not adoption. Your team delivers, you call it done, and whether anyone actually used it - or whether the account renewed - was someone else's problem.

• Out-of-balance managers - either no production code in 18+ months ("pure people manager"), or hiding behind your team's code instead of developing them ("I'd rather just code"). The role is 50/50.

• Senior ICs with no management track record. This needs evidence of hiring, performance management, and growth - not just being a great senior IC.

• PMs / program managers / consultants - every leader here writes code and produces creative work themselves.

• "I'll build my portfolio later." Not ready at application? Come back when it is.