Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Creative AI

The Opportunity Every global brand is now a content factory. They need thousands of on-brand asset variations every quarter — static, video, and increasingly 3D — and they need to ship them in days, not weeks. The customer who figures this out first wins the next decade of marketing. The base FDCT bench gets them there. The Principal FDCT sets the bar. You are the technical and creative anchor of the FDE org. You take the hardest customer engagements — the Fortune 100 brand with the impossible timeline, the strategic account where the CMO's job depends on the outcome, the messy enterprise stack where nothing works the way the docs say. You walk into the C-suite room and customers stop second-guessing the timeline. You mentor the rest of the FDCT bench and the team gets sharper around you. You have a name in this space. You've spoken at Adobe MAX, written the book, shipped the indie tool, or have a brand/VFX reel that headlines its own conference. When customers Google you, they find proof. This role is for someone who is maniacally focused on customer value, who has the rare combination of deep creative craft AND production engineering chops AND C-suite presence — and who has earned the public profile to prove it. What you'll do Own the hardest engagements. The strategic top-tier customer where the FDE motion has to land. The first engagement in a new vertical. The multi [... source excerpt omitted ...] into something a board chair signs off on. Bring deals home; bring renewals home. Mentor and grow the FDCT bench. Lift the average. Make the P40 hire you onboard land their first customer faster than the last one. Run live working sessions, code reviews, and internal masterclasses. Translate customer brief → working workflow at the depth and ambiguity level that breaks others. Firefly Services APIs, Workflow Builder nodes, custom plugins, Figma integrations, multi-system orchestration. Show the rest of the team what good looks like. Be the public face. Speak at Adobe MAX. Write on the Adobe Blog. Host live demos at customer advisory boards. Represent the FDE org externally and [... source excerpt omitted ...] search conversations. Make the hard call about what gets built next. Demo your work yourself — script, produce, edit. The demos you create become the org's reference demos. What you'll bring 12+ years straddling creative production AND technical building. Recognized creative work (motion, video, design, 3D, VFX, brand systems, post-production) AND named technical artifacts (indie tool, plugin ecosystem, published architecture, shipped product). At scale. Public proof, multiple forms. Application requires a public portfolio (link or PDF) showing shipped creative AND shipped technical artifacts. PLUS at least one named-reputation marker: Adobe MAX / NAB / SIGGRAPH / Cannes L