Director, Multimodal Data Research

We are seeking a Director (M60) to lead the Multimodal Data Research organization within Applied Science and Machine Learning (ASML). This organization is responsible for scaling, quality, and innovation in multimodal training data—spanning image, video, and audio—that powers Adobe Firefly’s foundational generative and editing models. The Multimodal Data Research organization sets the data foundation for Firefly’s multimodal intelligence, owning first‑party strategy and execution across ingestion, filtering, captioning, generation and editing‑centric datasets, data‑driven training experiments, and next‑generation data frameworks. By grounding model training in high‑quality, diverse, and workflow‑authentic data, the team directly shapes Firefly’s creative capabilities. This role calls for a technically deep director who can articulate long‑term vision, lead multiple senior teams, and orchestrate execution across a fast‑moving multimodal AI ecosystem. What You’ll Do Organizational Leadership & Strategy Set and own the long‑term vision and roadmap for multimodal data research across image, video, and audio. Define clear investment priorities across data quality, coverage, scalability, and iteration speed to support Firefly’s foundational and editing‑centric models. Build and evolve an organization that balances research innovation with operational excellence in data delivery. Lead multiple teams spanning multimodal data quality and scaling, captioning and prompt rewriting, data frameworks and infrastructure, and systematic training ablations to advance large‑scale pretraining and editing datasets. Establish org‑wide quality bars, taxonomies, and evaluation signals for multimodal training data. Partner across Adobe and drive adoption of shared tooling, data frameworks, and best practices to reduce duplication and accelerate iteration. People Leadership & Talent Development Lead, mentor, and grow senior managers, staff‑level ICs, and emerging leaders. Build a culture of technical rigor, ownership, and thoughtful risk‑taking. Attract and retain top talent in multimodal data, ML systems, and applied research. What You Need to Succeed Technical & Domain Expertise 10+ years of experience in machine learning, data systems, or applied research, with significant exposure to large‑scale ML training data. Deep understanding of how data quality, composition, and labeling affect generative and editing model behavior. Experience working with multimodal data (image, video, audio) and large‑scale data pipelines. Strong intuition for balancing research exploration with production constraints. Leadership & Strategy Proven experience leading multi‑team organizations in technically complex environments. Ability to set long‑term vision while driving near‑term execution. Strong cross‑functional leadership skills, with experience influencing research, product, infrastructure, and executive stakeholders. Excellent communicator, able to synthesize complex technical and organizational tradeoffs. Education Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a related field preferred. 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 creat ... (truncated, view full listing at source)