Principal AI Systems Engineer - C++ / Applied AI

We are looking for a Principal AI Systems Engineer with deep C++ expertise to help build the next generation of AI-enabled product and platform capabilities.

This role sits at the intersection of large-scale systems engineering, applied AI, and production software architecture. You will design and build the native infrastructure, service integration layers, evaluation systems, and reliability mechanisms that allow AI-powered features to operate safely, predictably, and efficiently inside complex software products.

This is not a research-only role and not a prompt-engineering role. This is a hands-on principal engineering role for someone who can move between architecture, production code, AI system design, technical strategy, and cross-team leadership.

The ideal candidate is a strong C++ engineer first, with practical AI fluency: someone who understands how modern AI systems behave, where they fail, how to integrate them into production workflows, and how to design systems that make AI useful, reliable, observable, and secure.

What You'll Do

AI-Native Systems Architecture

• Design and build native C++ infrastructure that connects complex product codebases to AI-powered services, agents, and model-backed workflows.

• Define clean execution interfaces, schemas, validation layers, and error-handling contracts for AI-driven actions.

• Create reliable bridges between product capabilities, AI orchestration systems, and backend services.

• Ensure AI-initiated actions behave safely, predictably, and consistently within existing product workflows.

• Guide long-term architecture decisions through ADRs, design documents, technical reviews, and cross-functional alignment.

C++ Platform and Integration Engineering

• Build high-quality C++ components for performance-sensitive, cross-platform environments.

• Own critical client-side infrastructure such as service connectivity, session lifecycle, authentication, TLS, reconnection, concurrency, and async execution.

• Design APIs and abstractions that are maintainable, testable, and scalable across multiple product surfaces.

• Improve code health through modernization, refactoring, better testing, and stronger engineering patterns.

• Balance performance, memory safety, reliability, backward compatibility, and developer experience in a mature codebase.

Applied AI Reliability and Evaluation

• Design systems that make AI features measurable, debuggable, and production-ready.

• Build evaluation frameworks for AI workflows, including automated task execution, output validation, regression testing, scoring, and human review loops.

• Define guardrails for AI-driven actions, including safety checks, capability boundaries, fallback paths, and failure handling.

• Create privacy-conscious tracing, observability, and diagnostics for model-backed systems.

• Partner with product, data science, security, legal, and AI governance teams to ensure AI capabilities meet quality, safety, and compliance expectations.

Technical Leadership

• Act as a technical lead across teams building AI-powered product infrastructure.

• Set engineering direction in ambiguous and fast-moving technical areas.

• Influence architecture across native clients, backend AI services, orchestration layers, and product experience teams.

• Mentor senior engineers and raise the quality bar for AI systems, C++ engineering, and production reliability.

• Help teams adopt AI-assisted engineering workflows for code generation, debugging, testing, documentation, and review., * You will work at the intersection of C++ systems engineering, applied AI, platform architecture, and product-scale impact.

• You will shape infrastructure that enables AI-powered experiences across multiple teams and product surfaces.

• You will influence both technical strategy and day-to-day engineering execution.

• You will help raise the bar for how teams build, evaluate, secure, and operate AI systems in production.

About the Team

This team builds foundational AI systems and native infrastructure for product engineering teams. We partner across client engineering, backend AI services, platform teams, product, data science, security, privacy, and release engineering.

We focus on durable architecture, production-quality implementation, measurable reliability, and practical AI adoption. Our goal is to make AI-powered software safer, faster, more capable, and easier for engineering teams to build and ship.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in C++.

• Strong experience building or maintaining large, mature, performance-sensitive codebases.

• Expertise in modern C++ design, memory management, concurrency, API design, debugging, and systems-level performance.

• Experience building cross-platform software across Windows, macOS, Linux, or similar environments.

• Hands-on experience integrating AI, LLMs, agents, or model-backed systems into production or production-adjacent software.

• Practical understanding of AI system failure modes, including hallucination, tool-calling errors, incomplete context, multi-turn drift, nondeterminism, and unreliable outputs.

• Experience designing reliable interfaces between AI systems and deterministic software systems.

• Strong systems architecture skills, including tradeoff analysis, technical strategy, and architecture documentation.

• Experience with testing at scale, including unit tests, integration tests, CI validation, regression testing, and quality gates.

• Ability to lead through influence across engineering, product, design, platform, security, and data science teams.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions to both engineering and executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with frontier model APIs such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, or similar systems.

• Experience designing tool/function-calling interfaces, agentic workflows, or AI orchestration systems.

• Experience building AI evaluation frameworks, automated scoring systems, or human-in-the-loop quality review.

• Familiarity with JSON-RPC, gRPC, WebSockets, REST, or similar service protocols.

• Experience with observability and tracing for AI systems or distributed systems.

• Experience with privacy-aware telemetry, data retention, secure client/service communication, or enterprise compliance requirements.

• Familiarity with sandboxing, safety boundaries, permissions, or policy enforcement for AI-initiated actions.

• Experience modernizing legacy C++ systems or improving developer productivity in large engineering organizations.

• Background in creative tools, productivity applications, developer tools, enterprise software, or complex desktop applications.

What Makes This Role Special

• You will help define how AI becomes a reliable part of complex production software systems.

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 position is $190,200 -- $360,500 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and 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 $248,900 - $360,500 In New York, the pay range for this position is $248,900 - $360,500 In Illinois, the pay range for this position is $219,500 - $317,775 In Washington, the pay range for this position is $246,400 - $356,800

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.

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