The OpportunityThe Forward Deployed Engineer role sits at the intersection of software engineering, solution architecture, and technical consulting. You will be embedded with Workfront's most strategic customers, working directly with their teams to solve hard platform challenges, design scalable integrations, and build what is needed to unblock adoption and expansion.
You will work in a cross-functional Customer Pod: a small, autonomous team with end-to-end ownership. As a senior engineer, you set technical direction for your accounts, mentor other builders, and close the gap between what customers need and what the platform delivers.
What You'll Do- Partner with strategic customers to understand their workflows, systems, security requirements, and business goals.
- Turn complex customer problems into scalable solution designs, reference architectures, and working prototypes.
- Build and ship custom integrations and extensions across Workfront Workflow, Workfront Planning, Workfront Fusion, APIs, and adjacent Adobe and third-party systems.
- Investigate and resolve production issues, from data and permissions models to automation, reporting, and performance.
- Lead architecture workshops, health checks, and technical deep dives that earn customer trust.
- Prototype and iterate quickly, using AI-assisted tools as a standard part of how you work.
- Feed field patterns back to product and engineering to shape the Workfront roadmap.
- Mentor engineers in the pod and set practices for how the team documents decisions and learnings.
- Own the technical relationship with assigned accounts from discovery through go-live and expansion.
What Success Looks LikeWe hire for demonstrated impact, not credential accumulation. Strong candidates show:
- Customer empathy. You meet customers on their terms and understand their constraints and definition of success.
- Ownership at senior level. You find problems before they are assigned and drive them to resolution without waiting for permission.
- Clear communication. You explain complex ideas to technical and executive audiences in workshops, architecture reviews, and briefings.
- Business acumen. You understand the use case before choosing the technology.
- Software craft. You write code, build prototypes, and ship working software. Your designs reflect implementation reality.
- Data and integration judgment. You weigh trade-offs in data models, API design, and system integration.
- Growth mindset and AI fluency. You use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or equivalent) to design, prototype, and deliver, and you build toward agentic capabilities.
Typical background: 8 to 12 years in software engineering, solution architecture, technical consulting, or customer-facing engineering. What matters is what that experience produced, not the title or the number of years.
Your Domain - Work management platforms: Workfront or comparable tools (project, portfolio, resource, planning, proofing, and approval workflows).
- Integration and automation: REST APIs, webhooks, event-driven patterns, and low-code or workflow orchestration tools such as Workfront Fusion.
- Enterprise architecture: Multi-system integration, SSO and identity, data flows, and API design across complex landscapes.
- Application development: Strong skills in a modern language such as Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Python.
- Cloud and data: AWS or Azure, plus reporting and analytics pipelines.
- Security and compliance: Enterprise permissions, data privacy, and regulated-industry constraints.
Nice to Have - Experience with Adobe Experience Cloud or Creative Cloud products, including Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Workfront Planning, or Adobe GenStudio.
- Background in SaaS work management, PPM, or marketing operations platforms.
- Experience building agentic or LLM-powered workflows in enterprise settings.
- Experience in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, or government.
- Track record of driving architecture decisions at team or organization level.
How You'll Work: Pod-Based ExecutionYou operate within a small, cross-functional Customer Pod embedded with specific strategic accounts. Each pod has a customer representative for feedback and validation, a product manager for prioritization, engineers and builders for implementation and experimentation, and an account team with enterprise architects for alignment and strategy.
The Forward Deployed Engineer is the technical execution backbone of the pod: customer-facing, hands-on, and focused on rapid end-to-end delivery. We run small, time-boxed experiments, keep tight customer feedback loops, prototype before fully building, document decisions, and use staged rollouts to reduce risk.
Why This Team- Solve complex enterprise problems with direct customer impact. Your solutions go live in production, not in slide decks.
- Work in autonomous pods embedded with Adobe's most strategic accounts.
- Combine architecture, engineering, and customer engagement in one role, so no two weeks look the same.
- Help shape a new engineering engagement model built on rapid experimentation and AI-assisted execution.
- Join the Lehi engineering community alongside experienced Workfront platform engineers.
This role is for engineers who want to understand not only how systems work, but why they matter to the customer.
AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.
At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI - and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it's restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.
Expected Pay Range: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 $159,200 - $301,600 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.
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.
