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.

The Sr. Engineering Manager (SEM) leads and develops engineering teams that build and operate business-critical transportation capabilities supporting Target’s domestic first-mile and middle-mile network. This portfolio spans carrier scheduling, delivery and trailer services, transportation movement data, yard and gate operations, shipping documentation, and integrations across internal and external systems.

As an SEM, you are accountable for engineering strategy, product delivery, technical health, and production operations across these capabilities. You will build strong engineering teams and establish practices that enable secure, resilient, observable, scalable, and highly available systems.

Working closely with Product, engineering partners, business and operations teams, and external technology partners, you will translate business priorities into technology strategy and execution. Success requires strong people leadership, systems thinking, technical judgment, operational discipline, stakeholder management, and clear communication.

Use your skills, experience, and talents to be part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals. As a Sr. Engineering Manager, you’ll take the lead as you:

• Lead and develop a high-performing engineering team. Create clarity of purpose and ownership, coach engineers and technical leaders, and own staffing, performance management, career development, succession planning, and capability growth.

• Partner with Product, business, and operations leaders to translate priorities into an executable technology roadmap. Balance new capabilities with reliability, security, scalability, modernization, and technical health while connecting engineering investments to measurable business and operational outcomes.

• Drive operational excellence and resilience for distributed, event-driven systems and APIs. Establish measurable reliability practices across observability, service levels, incident response, root-cause analysis, capacity and performance, recovery, and business continuity. Use production insights to reduce recurring incidents, systemic risk, and operational toil.

• Provide engineering leadership across complex integrations spanning transportation, shipment, appointment, trailer, movement, and shipping-document workflows. Ensure teams build reliable interfaces and treat data contracts, quality, reconciliation, traceability, and end-to-end observability as first-class engineering concerns.

• Shape technical strategy and modernization in partnership with senior engineers. Guide architecture and engineering standards, simplify systems, reduce technical debt and operational complexity, and improve engineering velocity while maintaining production stability.

• Guide teams building distributed enterprise systems using modern application, event-streaming, API, relational/document data, cloud/platform, and web technologies. Promote strong CI/CD, automated testing, secure development, DevOps, and engineering automation practices.

• Manage external technology partnerships while retaining Target engineering accountability. Establish clear integration contracts, non-functional requirements, production-readiness expectations, escalation paths, service reviews, and remediation plans.

• Accelerate responsible adoption of approved AI-assisted engineering practices. Help teams identify high-value use cases across development, testing, modernization, debugging, documentation, and operational analysis while maintaining appropriate quality, security, privacy, compliance, and human-review standards.

• Lead through influence across organizational boundaries. Manage cross-team dependencies and risks, remove roadblocks, develop technical leadership, and enable engineers to own technical design and execution. Communicate technology health, risks, tradeoffs, decisions, and investment needs clearly across technical and non-technical audiences.

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 engineering/software-development experience, including building and operating distributed enterprise applications in production.

• 1–3 years of engineering-management experience, with a demonstrated track record of developing engineers and delivering cross-functional products or platforms.

• Strong experience with production operations, observability, and reliability engineering, including service levels, incident management, root-cause analysis, capacity/performance management, and recovery practices.

• Experience leading teams responsible for resilient APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, and complex system integrations.

• Broad technical understanding of modern application development, event-streaming, relational and document data technologies, cloud/platform infrastructure, CI/CD, automated testing, secure software development, and DevOps.

• Demonstrated ability to guide architecture and modernization, manage technical debt, and balance near-term product delivery with long-term engineering health.

• Experience managing external technology partners and complex cross-team dependencies in large enterprise technology ecosystems.

• Experience enabling responsible adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools and practices.

• Strong people leadership, including coaching, performance management, career development, succession planning, and building sustainable engineering capability.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate technical health, risk, tradeoffs, and decisions across engineering, Product, business, operations, and external partners.

• Deep understanding of agile product development, with a mindset of delivering business value incrementally while continuously improving reliability, maintainability, and operational excellence.