Lead Engineer — Database Experience Platform (DBX)

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.

Lead Engineer — Database Experience Platform (DBX)

About the Role

As a Lead Engineer on the Database Experience (DBX) team, you will serve as the technical anchor for the platform that powers managed database infrastructure for hundreds of engineering teams across Target. The DBX platform manages multiple RDBMS and NoSQL database technologies across on-prem Virtual Machines, Kubernetes, and GCP.

You will partner to set technical direction across the platform's core backend services — workflow automation, inventory, and lifecycle orchestration — while acting as a force multiplier for the engineers around you. You create and own the architecture that best serves the platform's functional and non-functional needs, identify and drive changes that accelerate delivery or improve quality of service, and translate complex infrastructure challenges into reliable, scalable solutions. Core responsibilities are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Core Responsibilities

• Set engineering standards for correctness, durability, and operational safety.
• Identify and drive platform modernization.
• Establish and raise the bar for observability, reliability, and production readiness: SLOs, alerting, runbooks, and eliminating repeat incidents.
• Define and own the architecture for database lifecycle automation — provisioning, upgrades, HA conversion, snapshots, decommission — across on-prem and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Lead full-cycle implementations of platform capabilities from design through production operation, including driving technical decisions, coordinating cross-team dependencies, and owning production outcomes.
• Influence architecture across adjacent systems making sound tradeoffs across performance, availability, scalability, security, and developer experience.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers; lead design and code reviews that shape team-wide engineering norms.
• Collaborate with DBAs, platform engineers, and product stakeholders to translate operational requirements into durable, well-designed solutions.
• Maintain and evolve CI/CD pipelines, build tooling, and test automation infrastructure.

About You

Required

• 4-year degree or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of backend software engineering, including at least one full-cycle implementation of a platform capability, infrastructure service, or major technical initiative from design through production operation
• Deep expertise in Java/Spring Boot or similar JVM frameworks
• Demonstrated ability to define technical strategy, lead architectural decisions, and drive cross-team alignment
• Proven track record owning systems in production — including incident response, reliability improvements, and operational excellence
• Strong proficiency designing and building REST APIs and distributed systems at scale
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering, product, and infrastructure stakeholders

Helpful But Not Required

• Production Temporal experience — workflow versioning, replay determinism, and safe in-flight migration patterns
• Familiarity with API-driven infrastructure automation
• Understanding of performance and topology concerns relevant to stateful database workloads
• Experience with Kafka producer/consumer patterns and event-driven architecture
• JPA/Hibernate and Flyway schema design
• Spock/Groovy testing
• Kubernetes familiarity (StatefulSets, PVCs, pod disruption budgets)
• Observability practices — distributed tracing, metrics instrumentation, SLO definition and alerting
• Experience contributing to or supporting UI/UX for internal platforms, including React/TypeScript

Technologies

Java · Spring Boot · Temporal · Apache Kafka · JPA/Hibernate · Flyway · PostgreSQL · Cassandra · MongoDB · Redis · ElasticSearch · Kubernetes · GCP · Gradle · Vela CI · Micrometer/Grafana · React · Redux · Typescript · Cypress · Playwright

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.

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.