Engineer - Platform Services: API Platform

Pay is based on several factors which vary based on position. These include labor markets and in some instances may include education, work experience and certifications. In addition to your pay, Target cares about and invests in you as a team member, so that you can take care of yourself and your family. Target offers eligible team members and their dependents comprehensive health benefits and programs, which may include medical, vision, dental, life insurance and more, to help you and your family take care of your whole selves. Other benefits for eligible team members include 401(k), employee discount, short term disability, long term disability, paid sick leave, paid national holidays, and paid vacation. Find competitive benefits from financial and education to well-being and beyond at https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.

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 an Engineer, you serve as a technical specialist delivering the engineering that powers the product. You develop keen insight into the technical architecture and design to deliver robust and scalable software components. You constantly demonstrate the depth of your expertise by solving engineering problems. You are passionate about the quality of software and balance between speed of delivering new features and robustness of the software components you implement. You can handle operational issues with little or no oversight.  You actively review code to ensure the software quality and functional accuracy is maintained across the team. You are keen to learn the design and architecture of the product and participate in ceremonies that can influence both.

API Platform Team

The Engineer, API Platform builds and operates the core infrastructure that enables secure, scalable, and high-performance APIs across the enterprise. This role focuses on developing platform capabilities that power API onboarding, traffic management, governance, and developer self-service. As an Engineer, you contribute to the design, implementation, and automation of API platform components, applying distributed systems principles to deliver reliable, observable, and secure API infrastructure.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building scalable, secure, and automated API platform capabilities that support enterprise-wide development.

Key Responsibilities

API Platform Engineering

• Build and maintain API platform infrastructure leveraging HAProxy, with forward-looking adoption of Envoy Proxy.
• Implement advanced L7 traffic management including routing, rate limiting, retries, circuit breaking, and traffic shaping.
• Support TLS/mTLS termination and certificate lifecycle management.
• Enable progressive delivery patterns such as blue/green and canary deployments.

Automation & Platform Tooling

• Develop automation using Ansible for provisioning and configuration management.
• Build Golang-based tooling for API onboarding, configuration validation, and lifecycle management.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines for automated configuration validation and secure deployments.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code and standardized deployment practices.

Observability & Reliability

• Implement metrics, logging, and distributed tracing across platform components.
• Monitor and improve SLIs/SLOs for API availability and latency.
• Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and reliability improvements.

Security & Governance

• Implement authentication and authorization controls (OAuth2, JWT, mTLS).
• Enforce API governance and policy controls at the platform layer.
• Partner with security teams to integrate WAF and edge protection capabilities.

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

Use your technology acumen to provide input to assist with evaluation of new technologies and contribute to the design, lifecycle management, and total cost of ownership of services. Contribute to research and proof-of-concept initiatives for new technologies and assist with code review and design review, writes, organizes and maintains code based on designs. With guidance, delivers high-performance, scalable, repeatable, and secure deliverables. Participate in structured construction, automation, debugging, and implementation activities, ensuring architectural and operational requirements and best practices are met. Participate in disaster recovery planning and disaster recovery activities and participate in functional integration and regression testing and ability to automate test scripts. Resolve frequently encountered technical issues and monitors systems capacity with minimal assistance. Search and understand metadata about various data sources and metrics. Adhere to change and incident management standards and expectations.

Core responsibilities 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
• 1+ years of software development experience
• Demonstrates familiarity with current and emerging technologies in own scope of responsibility, and develops ability to apply these technologies
• Understands concepts of package solutions and package specific programming language with knowledge of development objects

• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation.

• Familiarity with reliability engineering principles (SLOs, SLAs, error budgets)
• Demonstrates and continuously builds upon domain-specific knowledge
• Demonstrates proficiency in at least one computer language
• Understands the concepts of distributed programming and applies it to their domain
• Knowledge of the different data structures in your chosen programming language and how to apply them.
• Maintains technical knowledge within areas of expertise
• Stays current with new and evolving technologies via formal training and self-directed education

Preferred Experience

• Proficiency in Golang and automation frameworks such as Ansible.

• Experience with Envoy Proxy and control-plane concepts (xDS).

• Exposure to Kubernetes networking and service mesh architectures.

• Familiarity with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or OpenTelemetry.

• Understanding of API lifecycle management and governance frameworks.

• Production experience with HAProxy or similar L7 proxy technologies.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, and load balancing concepts.

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.