Atishay Jain

Atishay Jain

Thinker | Tinkerer | Inventor | US Green Card Holder | Leader | Author | Programmer | Speaker | Principal Scientist @ Adobe

Technical strategist and principal-level engineering leader with 15+ years of experience architecting multi-surface software platforms across mobile, web, and desktop. Proven track record of setting long-term technical direction, driving platform strategy, and influencing product roadmaps and business outcomes across organizations. Over a decade of ownership of cross-product frameworks and SDKs adopted company-wide. Operate comfortably at both the architectural vision and hands-on execution - actively writing and reviewing code (~50%) while leading architectural strategy, platform evolution, and cross-functional alignment with product and business leadership. Speaker at multiple industry conferences, author of Hugo in Action, and inventor of Adobe Shape (US Patent US-9449248, IxDA Interaction Design Award 2014).
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Experience

Principal Scientist at Adobe Inc.

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Adobe Growth SDK

• Architect and strategic technical liaison between Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Creative Cloud / Document Cloud, adapting AEP technology to meet the scale, performance, and integration needs of CC/DC products. Designed and built the AEP SDK for desktop from scratch and architected cross-platform extensions on web, desktop, iOS, and Android SDKs.Successfully migrated 800M+ active Adobe users to the new platform ahead of schedule, spanning 30+ products, multiple architectures, and diverse market-specific use cases. Pioneered agentic and LLM-based integrations within the marketing stack, enabling intelligent automation and advanced data processing. Enabled new analytics capabilities, including Monthly Active Use (MAU) measurement, over the unified stack. Member of the Creative Cloud Architectural Council and Adobe Principal Group, guiding company-wide technical strategy and long-term platform evolution. Provide technical vision and guidance to developers and advise VP staff on strategy and technical recommendations.
Adobe Experience Platform
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CC Experience Platform

Architect driving technical direction and shaping the roadmap for multiple teams within the Creative Cloud Engagement and Experience organization, focused on in-product personalization. Serve as the final escalation point for complex technical challenges across my teams’ scope. Developed the Engagement SDK for all Adobe mobile apps, enabling experimentation in Paywalls, In-App Messages, and Push Notifications, contributing to $200M ARR in 2023.
Photoshop Mobile
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CC Experience Desktop

Lead developer of in-app systems, leading the development of the home screen, the entry point into Cloud Documents for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects and Dreamweaver. Provided the first client implementation, with full stack debugging to smoothen the rough edges of the migration of Adobe’s Extensibility Platform from Chromium to a custom React Native like solution (Adobe’s Unified Extensibility Platform). Representative for the Desktop applications in the planning for the rewrite of Adobe’s Licensing stack (Next Generation Licensing) for better handling the nuances of the SAAS migration of the business.
Creative Cloud

CC Libraries

Member of the influential team owning the cloud transformation of Adobe’s desktop products with its flagship ingredient synchronization solution. Prepared CC Libraries for the enterprise, enabling the proliferation of the technology from a single product demo to a scalable solution across imaging, publishing, video and 3D segments of the Adobe business. Expertise at design systems, diverse re-usable styles, their differences across the realms of design from videos to screen illustrations and print.

Extended this beyond Adobe with demos into Microsoft Office (eventually productized)

CC Libraries Demo

Adobe Shape

P• Primary Inventor and the only developer involved from the conceptualization to a stable release of award-winning augmented application - Adobe Shape CC (in Adobe Max keynote, 2014). Over half a million app store downloads in under six months of launch, tons of awards and great app store rating.

Worked in a small, cross-functional team with members of Adobe Design, Product Management and Research doing rapid experimentation, prototyping and development to release, in close collaboration with Adobe Research on advanced imaging algorithms, enabling them to run via GPGPU (OpenGL) processing on nascent iPhone 4 hardware.

Capture Demo

Adobe Color

Influential member of the small member team that resurrected Adobe Kuler from maintenance mode to be a part of two consecutive Adobe Max keynotes (2011, 2013). Major contributor to the architecture and implementation of the full web stack, its deployment as well as the native iOS Adobe Kuler app (now Adobe Capture).

Migrated the entire app from Coldfusion and Flash to HTML5 & nodejs over AWS alongside creating its native ObjC iOS app.

Adobe Color Demo

Adobe InDesign

Managed the Adobe Creative Suite SDK which powers HTML based extensions including the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite into Adobe InDesign. Went through the architectural migration of a complicated multi-gigabytes code-base from Carbon to Cocoa based MacOS architecture.

Knowledgeable with the COM based architecture of applications like InDesign and suite-based Illustrator.

Adobe InDesign CS SDK

Internships

During BE-CS at Thapar University

Microsoft Corporation

Developed a Fault Injection tool to test Windows Mobile 6 applications which could inject functions before and after any function present in a dll, including system calls like malloc and fopen (Sophomore Summer Internship 2008).
Presentation Report

Informatica Business Solutions

Developed a working Prototype of Informatica PowerExchange for Oracle Essbase based on a wizard based layout. Got an inside of the enterprise side of software development. (Final Year Project 2010).
Presentation Report

Authoring

Hugo In Action

Static sites and dynamic Jamstack apps

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Hugo in Action is a hands-on guide to using the Hugo static site engine to render these websites in milliseconds. Working with a complete example website and source code samples, you’ll learn how to build and host a site that will wow users and stay stable without a third-party server. Full coverage of the Jamstack (Javascript, APIs, Markdown) shows how easy it is to add complex features to super-simple sites, including eCommerce shopping carts, dynamic forms, and multilingual options. This website is built using Hugo. ISBN Print 9781617297007 & eBook 9781638350811
Flipping book effect by dhanishgajjar
Official Website Read

Patents

I love experimenting with emerging technology.
Most of my experiments still await a sponsorship to be productized. Here lies the selection that could get through.

Shape capture

Generation of salient contours using live video

US-9449248 In various implementations, a computing device is configured to provide a live preview of salient contours generated on a live digital video feed. In particular, a designer can use a computing device with a camera, such as a smart phone, to view a real-time preview of salient contours generated from edges detected in frames of a live digital video feed prior to capture, thereby eliminating the unpredictability of salient contours generated from a previously captured image. In some implementations, the salient contours are overlaid on a greyscale conversion of the live digital video feed for improved processing and visual contrast. Other implementations modify aspects of edge-detecting or post-processing filters for improved performance on mobile computing devices.
BIBTEX Access
Architecture for low overhead customizable routing with pluggable components

Architecture for low overhead customizable routing with pluggable components

A modular IOT enabled router with user controllable and pluggable modules. The architecture of the router and plugins allow users to install packet level and application level modules at real time without affecting the latency and router performance. The installed modules are executed in parallel in their own executing unit and in the predefined or user-specified order. The leveled architecture allows fine-grain control of the routing and forwarding internals like QOS, deep packet inspection, encryption, traffic flow control, and traffic filtering via packet level modules. At the same time, it allows running service like a proxy, firewall, web acceleration, ad blocking via application level modules. The full control provides an easy interface for a developer to write plugins for new protocols, SDN, IOT, and user applications and run them in separate controlled execution engine without affecting the core router engine that is running security.

Also have multiple patents in the same field in Indian Patent Office -

  • Software stack for smart home router platform with deployable apps - 201811028578
  • Hardware and network infrastructure design of smart home router platform with deployable apps - 201811028579
  • Application stack and platform for smart home router platform with deployable apps - 201811028580.
Image by ninita on Pixabay
BIBTEX Access

Speaking

Atishay Jain at CascadiaJS 2018 cascadia-white-background

CascadiaJS 2018

Ever tried calling C++ from Node or Electron. Hate native modules because of the compilation and maintenance issues. This talk is all about the solution to this problem - N-API that is stable with node 10. C++ to Node.js interop is a lot of fun.
Official Website View code
Atishay Jain at Byteconf 2019 [logo.jpg]

Byteconf JS 2019

Async-await even though is called as syntactic sugar, is much more. It enables many of the classic design pattern which were reserved for synchronous code not with async ones. Some ideas that were too complicated to implement with synchronous code are very easy with async. It has given new definitions to methods like memoize and also to wrapping methods for performance measurement. In this talk Atishay will discuss the new design patterns enabled by async-await. This talk is about the tricks that are too complicated to write with traditional JS code but are extremely easy to write with async. Open your eyes to modern JS - things that we were missing from right under our nose because we did not see async await the way it should have been - but instead as syntactic sugar.
Website View Slides
Atishay Jain at Cisco DevNet Create 2019 [logo.jpg]

DevNet Create 2019

When we think of node - we think of the server. Node is much more. It is the best solution for any I/O bound operations - even background processes running on customer machines. In this talk, Atishay will present the architecture of a unique node based application - a background process that acts like the browser’s “service worker” - downloading and caching resources even before the page is requested. Getting consistent, fast and effective performance based on network based data where the user can be offline is tricky - this talk will show how it is done. This talk will present the key components of the API that can provide cloud native experiences successfully at scale. Atishay works on Adobe’s CCXProcess, a unique application that is a node reverse proxy server, providing data driven by the server onto machines that can be offline for major parts of the day.
Official Website Slides
Atishay at Jam Stack Conference 2019

JAMstackconf SF 2019

By definition, a static website does not have a server. Then how, with the JAM stack can we really have a good shopping cart. This talk will have a demo of a system where no dynamic code is written on the server and a fully functional e-commerce website is presented using a static site builder, some APIs and JavaScript. Not every e-commerce system needs to be as dynamic as Amazon, and therefore should not use the same stack. You can avoid on-call work, constant updates and maintenance efforts when you use a CDN to host your shopping cart and get great performance to go along with it.
Website Slides View
Atishay at Frankfurt Gophers Group 2021 [icon.png]

Frankfurt Gophers 2021

Hugo is interesting to Go developers as despite being ageneric tool that you don’t need to learn Go for, it does some things very Go like. From using the Go terminology (e.g. slice) to the Go modules there is a lot of familiarity that a Go developer will find in the Hugo world. This talk at Frankfurt Rhein-Main Gophers introduces Hugo to the Go developers and talks about how Go and Hugo are close. If you know Go, take a look at the source code. You will find some real hidden gems.
Meetup

Education

Thirst for knowledge is quest forever. I am a student for life, always learning.
These formal courses form a major part of that learning.

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Wharton

CTO Course

Business & Technology

Learned from the expertise of renowned faculty and industry specialists in a course dedicated to putting technology in business context.

Technology is always a means to an end and that end is always business.

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Stanford University

Graduate Certificate

Artificial Intelligence

Studied Artificial Intelligence through graduate courses as a part of Stanford’s SCPD program.

Loved to be a part of the strong community of dedicated students engrossed in learning a field of study that promises immense impact on mankind. From Bayesian and Markov models to SIFT and then to LSTMs and Image Nets, it was funt to take modern AI to a spin.

Thapar University

Bachelors in Engineering

Computer Science

Completed engineering with CGPA of 9.84(10) and a merit scholarship from the University.

Dedicated, hardworking faculty and immense opportunity provided by various programming contests in North India had an immense impact in developing my skills.

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Brightlands School

High School

Science

Amongst school toppers with 94.6% in Class X and 96.25% in Class XII under the ICSE/ISC board, New Delhi. Completed schooling with a merit scholarship.

Schooling instills curiosity and persistence in an individual. I was blessed with some of the best teachers in North India.

Awards

Don’t live for appreciation, but accept it humbly if given.
Here is a selection of mine.

Professional

When you build technology and nobody notices it, nobody complaints about it but it chuggs along quielty, that is the sign of a good engineer.

  • Multiple plotlight awards using Awardco for exceptional work (2024-25)
  • Performance Bonus (2018, 2017)
  • Young Engineer’s Award (2015)
  • Special Contribution Award (2015)
  • Spot Awards(2012, 2013, 2015)
  • Adobe Kuler iOS - IxDA Interaction Design Award (2014), Communication Arts’ Interactive Design Award (2014), FWA Mobile of the Day (2013).
  • Adobe Shape - Horizon Interactive Award (2015).
  • CCNA certified (2009-11), SCJP (2008-)

College

Multiple awards & participation at college and other places like the IITs & Corporates. Also organized a bunch of events.

  • Represented Thapar University in ACM ICPC (2007-09)
  • Inter College IIT-R Cognizance (2008), IIT-K Kshitij(2008), PECFest 5
  • Corporate Schneider Electric Innovation Challenge (2009), IBM Great Mind Challenge (2009), Infosys Aspirations 2020, NetApp Texhibit
  • Intra-college GetSetGo 2007, Chakravyun 2006, Arithmania 2008.
  • Created Fundoori, a Yahoo-like portal for Patiala city.

School

Was amongst the school as well as state toppers

  • NTS Scholar - NCERT Govt. of India (2004)
  • Aptitude and Achievement Test(AAT) All India Ranks (Biology, Geography)- ICSE Board, New Delhi
  • INCA Map Quiz (3rd) - Survey of India.
  • School Official (2003)
  • Multiple achievement awards during annual day.

Hobbies

Miscellaneous winnings

  • Toastmasters International - Competent Communicator, Competent Leader - Fair Oaks Toastmasters (7528) - Past Secretary, Treasurer, VP-PR(Present).
  • Movie Making - Editor for short films, including Wasim that one first prize in IIT-R Thomso (2008)
  • Organized Aranya 2008(Thapar University), developed its website as well as Shauryagaatha exhibition(2007, 2008)
  • Multiple awards for drawing and painting during schooling.
  • Completed Kashmir Great Lakes and Kedarkantha treks.

Projects

Below is a selection of some of my popular projects, their short descriptions and useful links.

Adobe Shape CC

Adobe Shape CC

Real-time raster to vector conversion. Right from your iPhone or iPad. Inity made for iPhone 4+, it was merged into Adobe Capture on iOS and Android.

Briefly after its launch, this app was selected by Apple to be a part of the demo iPhones shown to the users at the Apple Stores. With almost a million downloads, Adobe Shape made into the marquee feature of Adobe Capture.

Mockup from 72px Designs
Read More App Store
All Autocomplete

All Autocomplete

Open Source extensions to Visual Studio Code that provides autocompletion/intellisense items based on all open files in the editor.

FOSS extension with over 25k downloads and community driven features. Pull Requests welcome.

Mockup from Graphberry
Fork Install
AOE Campaigns

AOE Campaigns

Over 50 scenarios in two custom campaigns for Age Of Empires I and II.

Were created when I was 15. Published in the SKOAR game magazine in 2006. The campaigns were accompanied with introductory voice-overs.

Image via tutorial
Download
26 January

26 January

Short film developed in college. A satirical piece on the state of humans and the Indian society.

Was built specifically for participating in contests. Wonderful acting by some of the veterans of the Thapar movie club.

Mokcup from Graphictwister
Watch
Adobe Kuler

Adobe Kuler

Augmented Reality Color capture application. Captures colors from video and images into themes. Also features a color wheel and color theme sliders.

Winner of multiple awards like the IxDA interaction design awards, Communication Arts interactive design awards and FWA app of th day. Had a million downloads before being merged into adobe capture.

Mockup from the cover on youtube
App Store Read More
Flash Game - Ball in the Hole

Flash Game - Ball in the Hole

Twist to the classic maze game where you control the acceleration and not the speed.

Created when I was a kid. Lost source code. It has over 30 levels with a proper dragon level in the end, bonus level on every 5 levels and clear instructions on how to play. Windows only. Relive the glorious days of simple indie flash games.

Mockup from Elegant Themes
Download
Wasim Mujahideen

Wasim Mujahideen

Short film shot during college of a guy wrongly accused just because of his name.

Won IIT R Thomso 2008 in short film category but I don’t have a proof for it. You can still enjoy the performance by Thapar Movie Club

Tempate from Wegraphics & Graphic Burger
Watch
Adobe Product Screens

Adobe Product Screens

Home Screens of Adobe’s Flagship dekstop applications - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere Pro and Dreamweaver. Provided stunning visuals to introduce new features and orient users on a A/B tested, server-controlled, offline-first, prime screen space on the machine.
Mockup from Graphic Twister. Screenshots by self.
Buy CC
Bond Forever

Bond Forever

Screenplay of a children movie about Carbon Bond fighting with the evil Sulphora.

Created while learning 3D design and rendering. Was intended to be a short film but never got to real work, only a screenplay.

View
Sabse Bada Rupaiya

Sabse Bada Rupaiya

My first short film. Wrote the screenplay, did some parts of the direction and editing.

A stupid plot producing an unexpected but genius result.

Mockup from Behance
Watch
Atishay.me

Atishay.me

This website. Custom made theme. JS optional. Optimized, extremely fast to build. Performance score 100. Proper content - data separation. Super fun to extend. Great to learn from.
Mockup by Tran Mau Tri Tam from Behance
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Publications

More than a blogger. I write to academic journals, websites, magazines and anywhere I can get my hands on.

Hyperlinking Beyond the Web

Hyperlinking Beyond the Web

Hyperlinks are the oldest and the most popular feature of the web. The word hypertext (which is the ht in http/s) means text having hyperlinks. The ability to link to other people’s hypertext made the web, a web — a set of connected pages. This fundamental feature has made the web a very powerful platform and it is obvious that the world of apps needs this feature. All modern platforms support a way for apps to register a URI (custom protocol) and also have universal links (handling web links in an app).
Image from Pixabay
Access
Zigbee

Impact of Coordinator Mobility on the throughput in a Zigbee Mesh Networks

Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4) standard interconnects simple, low power and low processing capability wireless devices. The Zigbee devices facilitate numerous applications such as pervasive computing, national security, monitoring and control etc. An effective positioning of nodes in a ZigBee network is particularly important in improving the performance (e.g., throughput) of ZigBee networks. In the wireless sensor network (WSN) literature, the use of a mobile sink is often recommended as an effective defense against the so-called hot-spot phenomenon. But the effects of mobile coordinator on the performance of the network are not given due consideration. In this paper, we perform extensive evaluation, using OPNET Modeler, to study the impact of coordinator mobility on ZigBee mesh network. The results show that the ZigBee mesh routing algorithm exhibits significant performance difference when the router are placed at different locations and the trajectories of coordinator are varied. We also show that the status of ACK in the packet also plays a critical role in deciding network performances.
Image from Zigbee alliance
BIBTEX Access
Smart Home

Modified Epc Global Network Architecture of Internet of Things for High Load Rfid Systems

This paper proposes a flexible and novel architecture of Internet of Things (IOT) in a high density and mobility environment. Our proposed architecture solves the problem of over-loading on the network by monitoring the total number of changed objects changing global location crossing the fringe boundaries rather than the actual number of objects present or those that move within the local area. We have modified the reader architecture of the EPCglobal Architecture. The components and the working of the model has been illustrated in detail. We have also discussed the physical implementation of our model taking the examples of a smart home sample application and the performance results have been tabulated and represented graphically.
Image by StruffelProductions on Pixabay
BIBTEX Access
Question Answering

Answering Squad

Question Answering is a very important cornerstone of natural language processing where a machine should be able to understand human language to an extent that an individual could ask questions to the machine in the language he/she understands and then get the answers back in the same language without the involvement of experts. In this project we evaluate a neural network based Question Answering system using a simple model and see how a very basic model performs on the StanfordQuestion Answering dataset.
Image by qimono on Pixabay
BIBTEX Access
3D Reconstruction

Automatic 3D Reconstruction for symmetric shapes

Generic 3D reconstruction from a single image is a difficult problem. A lot of data loss occurs in the projection. A domain based approach to reconstruction where we solve a smaller set of problems for a particular use case lead to greater returns. The project provides a way to automatically generate full 3-D renditions of actual symmetric images that have some prior information provided in the pipeline by a recognition algorithm. We provide a critical analysis on how this can be enhanced and improved to provide a general reconstruction framework for automatic reconstruction for any symmetric shape.
BIBTEX Access

Sokoban Solver

Artificial Intelligence is becoming instrumental in a variety of applications. Games serve as a good breeding ground for trying and testing these algorithms in a sandbox with simpler constraints in comparison to real life. In this project, we aim to develop an AI agent that can solve the classical Japanese game of Sokoban using various algorithms and heuristics and compare their performances through standard metrics.
BIBTEX Access

Blog

Read more about my thoughts at my blog.
Here are some recent posts

Technical Proficiency

After knowing the basics of programming, one should know the assumptions and constraints of the domain.
It doesn’t matter what language or tooling is needed. You can get upto speed quickly.

Business and Technology

  • Marketing with technology
  • Business models - Platform, Subscription, Pay per use
  • Building for a future inflection point
  • Building for flexibility
  • When and where to use AI and LLMs

AI and LLMs

Prompt Engineering and Agentic Loops

  • The text completion and mesaging APIs with tool calls
  • Vector stores and RAG
  • Building MCP Servers
  • Agentic loops

Web

Full Stack

  • Your JS framework (React / Angular)
  • Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Python
  • AWS or Custom deployment
  • SEO, A/B testing, Analytics
  • On Call experience

Mobile

iOS, Android

  • Obj-C/C++/Swift/Kotlin/Java
  • GCD, Couroutines, Async/Await
  • Core Data, LiveData, Migrations, Updates

Desktop

Windows, MacOS, Electron

  • Win32, AppKit
  • C++ / C# / ObjC / Java
  • Installers
  • Electron with Native Modules
  • Your language / framework

Contact Me

Leave me a message at contact [at] atishay [dot] me