Staff Applied Scientist - VLLM Inference

Changing the world through digital experiences is what Adobe’s all about. We give everyone—from emerging artists to global brands—everything they need to build and deliver outstanding digital experiences. We’re passionate about empowering people to develop beautiful and powerful images, videos, and apps, transforming how companies interact with customers across every screen. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and are committed to crafting outstanding employee experiences. Everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize new ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, and we know the next big idea could be yours! Adobe Firefly’s ASML group invites research scientists and engineers passionate about conditional generation and editing of large generative AI models. This role emphasizes images and videos. We strive to advance generative AI technology while guaranteeing models possess excellent quality and control. As an Applied Scientist, you will define technical strategy for multimodal data intelligence systems, architect and optimize distributed LLM/VLM inference platforms, and develop innovative solutions for automated captioning, tagging, metadata enrichment, and dataset creation. You will work at the intersection of research and engineering, collaborating with teams across modeling, infrastructure, data, evaluation, and product to deliver high-quality AI capabilities at scale. You will have the opportunity to influence the next generation of Adobe Firefly models by improving data quality, model efficiency, and scalable AI infrastructure used by millions of creators worldwide. Job Responsibilities

• Architect and optimize distributed multimodal inference pipelines for large-scale image, video, and audio captioning, tagging, and metadata generation.
• Drive LLM/VLM inference optimization, including batching, scheduling, quantization, model serving, caching, and GPU utilization to maximize throughput and cost efficiency.
• Build scalable data generation workflows using state-of-the-art vision-language and multimodal foundation models to improve training data quality.
• Lead technical strategy for automated dataset annotation, filtering, quality scoring, deduplication, and metadata enrichment across multimodal datasets.
• Design distributed processing systems capable of handling billions of media assets across heterogeneous compute environments.
• Collaborate with research teams to productionize new LLM/VLM capabilities while ensuring scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to improve distributed execution frameworks, storage systems, and inference services.
• Drive cross-functional alignment across data, research, infrastructure, evaluation, and product teams on multimodal data processing strategy.
• Mentor engineers in distributed systems, scalable ML infrastructure, and multimodal AI engineering best practices.

What you'll need to succeed

• Ph.D. or M.S. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, with significant industry experience designing and deploying large-scale distributed ML systems.
• Deep expertise in large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), or multimodal foundation models, with hands-on experience building, optimizing, and serving inference workloads at scale.
• Strong background in distributed systems, large-scale data processing, and cloud-native ML infrastructure, with experience using frameworks such as Ray, Spark, Dask, Kubernetes, or equivalent technologies.
• Proven experience optimizing large-scale LLM/VLM inference systems, including techniques such as batching, parallelism, quantization, model serving, GPU utilization optimization, and latency/throughput tuning.
• Experience building high-throughput multimodal data pipelines for automated image, video, and audio understanding tasks, including captioning, tagging, OCR, metadata extraction, and semantic indexing.
• Hands-on experience with modern ML inference and serving frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang, Triton Inference Server, TGI, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience managing and processing petabyte-scale multimodal datasets using distributed storage and data processing systems.
• Familiarity with multimodal embedding models, retrieval-augmented systems, vector search infrastructure, and data quality evaluation methodologies.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and PyTorch, with a track record of developing reliable, production-grade distributed ML systems.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical strategy and drive alignment across research, infrastructure, and product teams.

About Adobe

Adobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe’s industry-leading offerings including Adobe Acrobat Studio, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, and GenStudio enable people and businesses to turn ideas into impact, powered by AI and driven by human ingenuity.

Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We’re on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours.

Let’s Adobe together

At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.

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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 $164,000 - $313,300 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 $216,400 - $313,300

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.

State-Specific Notices

California

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Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

Colorado

Application Window Notice

If this role is open to hiring in Colorado (as listed on the job posting), the application window will remain open until at least the date and time stated above in Pacific Time, in compliance with Colorado pay transparency regulations. If this role does not have Colorado listed as a hiring location, no specific application window applies, and the posting may close at any time based on hiring needs.

Massachusetts:

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It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.