Job Description
The Opportunity We're seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead the Agent Platform work for Firefly Boards. Boards is bringing agentic AI to the infinite canvas, and this role owns the engineering systems that make that work production-grade: the server-side agent runtime, the integration with Adobe's central agent platform, and the application stack that lets the agent act on the canvas alongside human users in real time. You'll partner closely with the agentic team that owns the intelligence side of the product (skills, model selection, agent quality), with a deliberate split of responsibilities. They define what the agent does and how well it does it. You define the systems it runs on. Firefly Boards is an AI-powered mood-boarding and ideation app that provides a non-linear infinite canvas. It enables a new generation of creatives to embrace generative AI and those who find the linear workflows of legacy software restrictive. Images and videos can be imported or generated using AI models and edited, remixed, iterated on, and organized flexibly, making it easier for artists to visualize and develop ideas on their own or in collaboration. What You'll Do This role has three primary areas of ownership and several secondary responsibilities. The work spans the full stack — server-side runtime, web client, and the cross-team architecture that ties them together. Primary: Server-side agent runtime. Stand up and own the service that runs Boards' agent workflows. State management, checkpointing, interrupt-and-resume across long-running operations, error recovery, and observability. This is the spine of the system and the foundation everything else builds on. Browser/server execution boundary. Define and own how server-side workflows dispatch to browser-only tools (canvas operations, viewport state, selection) and resume cleanly. Design the protocol, the runtime contract, and the in-client tool registration and invocation surface. Make it reliable under multiplayer conditions where humans and agents are editing the same document. Agent platform integration. Own the integration between Boards' agent runtime and Adobe's central agent platform. Co-shape platform contracts where Boards needs services that don't yet exist in the platform-supported shape. This is a cross-org partnership, not a one-off integration. Secondary: Boards backend services for agentic consumption. Refactoring existing Boards APIs and adding new ones to be agent-callable. API design under real constraints: idempotency, transactional boundaries, undo, multiplayer-aware mutations. Production-grade systems concerns. End-to-end observability and tracing for agent runs. Latency budgets across runtime, tools, and model calls. Deployment, rollout, rollback. The work that turns a working prototype into something that's operable at scale. How The Role Works This is a senior IC role, not a tech lead role. You set engineering direction for the agent platform work and partner across organizational boundaries to make the integration with Adobe's central agent platform succeed. The agentic team owns the intelligence side of the product — skills, prompts, tool design, model selection, and agent-quality evaluation. You own the systems they build on. The contract between the two teams is jointly designed; you're peers, with shared accountability for the product working end-to-end. Cross-team architecture is a real part of this role. You'll partner with Adobe's central agent platform team, the document services platform, model registry, identity, and security. Influence-without-authority across organizations is the operating mode. Ideal Qualifications Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science 10+ years of product engineering experience, with significant ownership of production systems at scale Demonstrated full stack depth: backend services and modern web client work in roughly equal measure. JavaScript/TypeScript, declarative UI frameworks (React, Lit, Vue), and a strong server-side language Distributed systems depth. Real experience with state management, checkpointing, async work, long-running operations, and recovery from partial failure. Track record of designing and operating systems with these properties, not just consuming them Experience integrating with a central platform team as a tenant. Has done the work of being an early customer of an internal platform and shaping it from that position Experience designing service APIs and microservices, including REST or equivalent contracts that hold up across teams Experience driving sophisticated software architecture, design, and development across multiple teams or organizations Track record of writing clean, testable code and creating reusable components Strong written and verbal communi