About us:

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and culture. Learn more about Target here.

As a lead engineer, you serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team that supports a product. You create, own and are responsible for the application architecture that best serves the product in its functional and non-functional needs.  You identify and drive architectural changes to accelerate feature development or improve the quality of service (or both).  You have deep and broad engineering skills and are capable of standing up an architecture in its whole on your own, but you choose to influence a wider team by acting as a “force multiplier”.  Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description.  Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Use your skills, experience and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals.  As a Lead Engineer, you’ll take the lead as you…
Use your technology acumen to apply and maintain knowledge of current and emerging technologies within specialized area(s) of the technology domain.

• Evaluate new technologies and participates in decision-making, accounting for several factors such as viability within Target’s technical environment, maintainability, and cost of ownership. Initiate and execute research and proof-of-concept activities for new technologies.
• Lead or set strategy for testing and debugging at the platform or enterprise level.
• In complex and unstructured situations, serve as an expert resource to create and improve standards and best practices to ensure high-performance, scalable, repeatable, and secure deliverables. Lead the design, lifecycle management, and total cost of ownership of services.
• Provide the team with thought leadership to promote re-use and develop consistent, scalable patterns. Participate in planning services that have enterprise impact. Provide suggestions for handling routine and moderately complex technical problems, escalating issues when appropriate.
• Gather information, data, and input from a wide variety of sources; identify additional resources when appropriate, engage with appropriate stakeholders, and conduct in-depth analysis of information. Provide suggestions for handling routine and moderately complex technical problems, escalating issues when appropriate.
• Develop plans and schedules, estimate resource requirements, and define milestones and deliverables.
• Monitor workflow and risks; play a leadership role in mitigating risks and removing obstacles.
• Lead and participate in complex construction, automation, and implementation activities, ensuring successful implementation with architectural and operational requirements met. Establish new standards and best practices to monitor, test, automate, and maintain IT components or systems.
• Serve as an expert resource in disaster recovery and disaster recovery planning. Stay current with Target’s technical capabilities, infrastructure, and technical environment. Develop fully attributed data models, including logical, physical, and canonical.
• Influence data standards, policies, and procedures. Install, configure, and/or tune data management solutions with minimal guidance. Monitor data management solution(s) and identify optimization opportunities.

Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

About you:

• 4 year degree or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of software development experience, including at least one full end-to-end lifecycle delivery
• Proven experience building and scaling highly distributed, high-availability systems
• Strong proficiency in Java and/or Kotlin with hands-on experience in Spring Boot
• Deep expertise in System Design , with a focus on scalability, resilience, and fault tolerance
• Experience designing and implementing Microservices architectures and event-driven systems using Kafka
• Strong knowledge of RDBMS (MySQL/PostgreSQL) with familiarity in NoSQL technologies (Cassandra is a plus)
• Solid foundation in Data Structures & Algorithms with exceptional problem-solving capability
• Experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD), code quality standards, and modern engineering best practices
• Hands-on experience with Docker, containerized environments, and CI/CD pipelines
• Demonstrated expertise in performance optimization, capacity planning, observability, and operational excellence
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to design, review, and drive end-to-end technical solutions across teams
• Stays current with new and evolving technologies via formal training and self-directed education
• Maintains deep technical knowledge within areas of expertise
• Communicates and coordinates with project team, partners, and stakeholders
• Demonstrates broad and deep expertise in multiple computer languages and frameworks (e.g., open source). Designs, develops, and approves end-to-end functionality of a product line, platform, or infrastructure.