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Job Title: Enterprise Risk Critical Activation Lead

Classification: Exempt

Date: September 2026

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.  

To match the signature style and passion of Target’s distinctive retail brand, Target Legal Affairs is a dynamic and deeply knowledgeable team of experts. Whether specializing in law, government affairs, risk, compliance, ethics, security or food safety, we use our expertise and influence to advocate for Target, support Target’s business, and mitigate risk for the company. We work with both internal and external entities on key issues that affect Target’s ability to productively, ethically, and securely conduct business. Through our understanding of Target’s business models and operations, we help facilitate Target’s growth, and provide guidance that leaders rely on to make sound, well-informed decisions. Simultaneously, we help protect the business by applying our comprehensive understanding of risk and the law on issues that impact our brand, guests, team members, stores, distribution centers, and corporate locations.

Here, you’ll enjoy working autonomously with a healthy work-life balance. Your passion for learning the business, collaborating with others and building relationships with senior leaders and key business partners that you support will be essential to tackling the ever-changing legal and risk-based challenges we face in a dynamic and fast-paced retail environment.

Target is strengthening its enterprise-wide critical activation and crisis response capabilities to meet increasing complexity and scale. In this role you will lead and coordinate the enterprise’s response to critical activation events — including reputation, cyber, infrastructure and security incidents — serving as a key connector between business leaders, functional teams and enterprise risk leadership during high-stakes, time-sensitive situations.

As Enterprise Risk Critical Activation Lead, you will:

• Respond to critical escalations across the enterprise, this includes a component of an on call style support model to ensure coverage outside of core HQ hours
• Lead end-to-end critical activation response across the enterprise for reputation, cyber, infrastructure and security risk events, coordinating cross-functional teams from initial alert through resolution and after-action review
• Serve as a central coordination point during activations, driving alignment and rapid decision-making across a wide range of internal teams including Security, Technology, Communications, Legal, HR and business operations
• Develop and maintain activation playbooks, escalation protocols and response frameworks to ensure consistent, repeatable and effective enterprise-wide crisis response
• Navigate significant ambiguity and time pressure during activation events, making sound judgment calls and providing clear direction when information is incomplete or rapidly evolving
• Build and sustain strong relationships with a broad set of senior leaders and cross-functional partners to enable rapid mobilization and trusted collaboration during high-stakes events
• Facilitate real-time situational awareness by gathering, synthesizing and communicating critical information to enterprise risk leadership and key stakeholders during activations
• Lead after-action reviews and lessons-learned processes following activation events to identify gaps, strengthen response capabilities and drive continuous improvement along side Enterprise Risk Governance
• Partner with business continuity, technology resilience, security and intelligence teams to ensure activation plans are integrated across the enterprise
• Support the design and execution of activation exercises, tabletop simulations and readiness assessments to test and improve enterprise response capabilities
• Any other duties as assigned

About You:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and experience
• 5+ years of relevant experience in crisis management, incident response, critical event coordination, business continuity or a related field
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional response efforts under significant time pressure and ambiguity
• Experience developing and maintaining crisis playbooks, escalation protocols or activation frameworks
• Ability to build rapid trust and effective relationships with senior leaders across diverse business functions
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to deliver clear, concise updates to senior leadership during high-stakes situations
• Strong analytical and critical thinking skills with the ability to synthesize information quickly and make sound decisions with incomplete data
• Established acumen with genAI tools and prompting for ongoing exploration as part of new ways of working

Desired Requirements:

• Experience in a large-scale retail, corporate or matrixed operating environment
• Crisis management, business continuity or incident response certification (e.g., CBCP, MBCI, ICS)
• Experience with crisis management platforms, mass notification systems or incident management tools
• Experience coordinating enterprise-level responses to cyber incidents, physical security events or large-scale operational disruptions
• Familiarity with enterprise risk management frameworks, business impact analysis or scenario planning methodologies

This position will operate as a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Target’s needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team member’s core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned to and virtually, depending upon what your role, team and tasks require for that day. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Click here if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota. 

Benefits Eligibility

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

In compliance with state and federal laws, Target will make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please reach out to [email protected]. Non-accommodation-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.