Principal Engineer Target Marketplace Technology

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 Principal Engineer in Target Marketplace Technology, you set the strategy for software development and infrastructure engineering at Target. You set the direction for how software and infrastructure engineering efforts will be designed, developed, and operationalized across multiple portfolios and drive adoption. You lead and approve software and infrastructure engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements. You are a thought leader and mentor for internal and external technical talent and actively contribute to the external technical community.

Target Marketplace is an important growth area with an ambition to significantly scale the business in the coming years, and Marketplace Technology serves as a critical interface between Target and our sellers and channel partners. In this highly visible role, you will lead foundational architecture work that enables that growth, including reimagining Marketplace workflows and integration patterns across core Target enterprise systems for the needs of a scaled third-party seller ecosystem.

Use your skills, experience and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll take the lead as you…

• Understand Target's business and technical environments and provide the technical leadership in resolving complex business challenges via current technical solutions by assessing viability/applicability/cost implication through prototypes and POCs.

• Lead the architecture and engineering of sophisticated, production-grade Marketplace capabilities that span organizational and platform boundaries, with a focus on building durable systems that can support materially greater seller, assortment, transaction, and operational scale.

• Shape the modernization of Marketplace workflows that connect with enterprise capabilities, establishing clear abstractions, resilient contracts, and scalable patterns where existing systems were originally optimized for first-party retail.

• Lead designing and building platform APIs and services with deep focus on non-functional requirements including scalability, availability, performance, resilience, security, and operability, while being a strong advocate of agile and DevOps practices across engineers.

• Apply AI thoughtfully to accelerate engineering outcomes and help establish AI-native approaches where they create meaningful business and technical advantage.

• Collaborate with technical staff, product partners, and Enterprise Architecture teams in setting technical direction across platforms and drive technology lifecycle management and communication of standards/decisions to the engineering team.

• Work with engineering leaders to build a high performing engineering team and provide technical leadership, coaching, motivation and participate in the selection of technical talent.

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

About you

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field required; Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field preferred. Continuing education to maintain thorough knowledge of technical domains along with staying current in latest technologies

• 12+ years of experience in technology development or services, ideally in a product-led technology environment; retail or marketplace experience is strongly preferred

• 4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction

• Proven track record of leading significant architecture evolution and raising technical maturity for systems of comparable scale, with demonstrated success navigating both deep technical complexity and cross-organizational dependencies

• Possesses a strong understanding of distributed systems, platform and API design, data and integration patterns, and the engineering tradeoffs required to build resilient, scalable, production-grade software

• Understands business fundamentals and how technologies can support business goals along with how to translate business vision into a technical strategy while understanding the financial implications

• Has proven leadership capabilities, the ability to influence others, interpersonal skills, and problem solving skills, including the ability to align teams and senior stakeholders across organizational boundaries

• Strong team player who understands concepts of teamwork and team effectiveness.

• Has excellent verbal, written, and presentation communication skills to convey complex technical solutions clearly to an organization

• Has excellent planning and organizational skills.

• Deep hands-on engineering experience with modern JVM technologies, including Kotlin with Micronaut and Java with Spring Boot, plus strong experience with SQL/NoSQL data stores, APIs, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud technologies

• Demonstrated success using AI-enabled engineering practices to accelerate delivery and improve outcomes, along with experience designing or building AI-native systems and capabilities