Principal Engineer AI/ML
Adobe · San Jose, CA
$206,400–$379,100from the description
Jul 11, 2026
San Jose, CA
Jul 20, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
Principal level · 14+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 3 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 1–5
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $189,150 (middle half $152,859–$224,286). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The role sits at the intersection of AI/ML research and production engineering — it could reasonably be classified as a Software Developer (15-1252) given the emphasis on architecting and shipping end-to-end AI systems, but the dominant day-to-day work (modeling, evaluation, retrieval, representation learning, LLM fine-tuning) aligns more closely with Data Scientists (15-2051).
The compensation range quoted ($206,400–$379,100/yr) is the broad US range; the California-specific range is $261,800–$379,100/yr. Both are listed in the posting.
Degree requirement is listed as 'Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. … or equivalent experience,' so no minimum degree is hard-gated.
The posting does not specify a single work location beyond 'several U.S. geographic markets'; Adobe's GenStudio team is headquartered in San Jose, CA, which is used as the metro. Remote status is not stated as fully remote.
'Experience building and shipping GenAI-first applications at enterprise scale' appears under 'Preferred Attributes' and is treated as preferred.
TensorFlow and Keras are listed together as 'TensorFlow/Keras' in the posting; JAX is listed alongside them as an alternative ML framework option — all three are captured as alternatives to PyTorch's companion framework slot. PyTorch is listed first and separately.
LoRA and QLoRA are listed as interchangeable fine-tuning techniques under the same requirement; RAG and GraphRAG are similarly paired.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): multi-agent orchestration.
Read the full posting
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