Director of Engineering, Real Time Experience (RTX)

Adobe's Digital Video & Audio (DVA) business builds Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder, the tools that filmmakers, broadcasters, and creators trust to tell their stories. At the center of these products sits the Realtime Experience (RTX) team. RTX owns the rendering engine, GPU abstraction layer, compositor, video player, importer and exporter host, and Effects and Transitions SDK. Every frame our customers play, edit, and export passes through this stack.

The next 12 months will define the future of video creation at Adobe. RTX is finishing its GPU-first pipeline, moving to a modern graphics API, and designing how AI-native rendering fits in. Leader for this team will shape the engine under Premiere Pro and After Effects for years to come.

We are hiring a Director of Engineering for RTX. The team is senior and highly specialized, and it needs a leader with matching depth. The Director will own these modernization efforts and align the many teams that touch rendering, as Topaz and LTX integrations arrive.

This role sets the technical vision for the rendering technology behind DVA's desktop products, with a near-term focus on Premiere Pro performance and stability. Architectural decisions come with clear investment plans for engineering and quality engineering.

• Deliver the GPU-first rendering pipeline to improve playback, scrubbing, and dropped frames.
• Choose and lead the move to a modern graphics and compute API such as DirectX 12, Vulkan, or Dawn/WebGPU.
• Define how AI features and partner technologies such as Topaz and LTX fit the render pipeline while keeping quality and user experience high.
• Unify rendering, effects, and transitions across desktop, web, and mobile.
• Build lasting partnerships with technology leaders and shape our roadmap around their platform plans.
• Work with media and format teams to modernize legacy components, and align partner teams on shared priorities.
• Lead the engineering side of a Developer Relations effort to unify and document our SDKs and raise third-party plugin quality, protecting a key competitive advantage.

The Director also grows a team of managers, architects, and senior engineers, protects the quality bar, and coaches leaders as the organization changes.

Are you a technical leader whose judgment shapes the product? The ideal candidate does not need to write shaders, but knows which paths lead to great outcomes and can defend that view to engineers, partners, and executives.

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with deep architectural judgment in GPU-accelerated, real-time rendering, graphics, or media systems.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams, with proven people leadership at senior engineering manager level or above, including developing managers and growing careers.
• Experience building or leading performance-critical software such as rendering engines, playback and compositing systems, game engines, or broadcast tools.
• Strong knowledge of GPU architecture and compute, and of modern graphics APIs including Metal, DirectX 12, Vulkan, and WebGPU.
• A track record in large, mature C/C++ desktop codebases, modernizing them while continuing to ship.
• A clear point of view on where rendering technology is heading, and the skill to turn it into a funded, staffed plan.
• Strong influence across Product, Engineering, QE, and external partners.

• Understanding of video codecs, formats, and import and export pipelines, and how they affect playback and effects.
• Experience in games, VFX, AR/VR, real-time 3D, or live broadcast production.
• Experience adding AI or ML inference to rendering or media pipelines.
• Experience unifying rendering across desktop, web, and mobile.
• Experience building developer ecosystems, SDKs, or plugin programs.

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.

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Expected Pay Range:

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