The Role
The Lead Engineer will provide technical leadership, develop scalable systems, ensure code quality, integrate AI capabilities, and influence architecture across the organization.
Summary Generated by Built In
Lead Engineer – Role & Responsibilities
As a Lead Engineer, you will provide technical leadership and architectural direction while remaining hands-on in building scalable, resilient, and production-grade systems. You will play a critical role in shaping engineering standards, driving modernization, and enabling intelligent, AI-powered capabilities across the platform.
Key Responsibilities
As a Lead Engineer, you will provide technical leadership and architectural direction while remaining hands-on in building scalable, resilient, and production-grade systems. You will play a critical role in shaping engineering standards, driving modernization, and enabling intelligent, AI-powered capabilities across the platform.
Key Responsibilities
- Technology Evaluation & Innovation
- Evaluate emerging technologies and contribute to architectural decision-making, considering alignment with Target’s technical ecosystem, long-term maintainability, scalability, and total cost of ownership.
- Lead research initiatives and proof-of-concept efforts to validate new tools, frameworks, and platforms before adoption.
- Architecture & Engineering Excellence
- Design and own scalable, secure, high-performance architectures.
- Establish and evolve engineering standards and best practices in complex or ambiguous environments.
- Lead service design, lifecycle management, and overall technical governance of team-owned platforms.
- Ensure code quality, infrastructure standards, and long-term sustainability of services.
- Hands-On Development & Delivery
- Contribute directly to development efforts, particularly on complex and high-impact components.
- Ensure solutions are production-ready, deployable, resilient, and scalable.
- Drive implementation quality through strong testing, automation, and CI/CD practices.
- Enterprise Impact & Thought Leadership
- Provide technical thought leadership to promote reusable components and consistent architectural patterns.
- Participate in planning and designing services with enterprise-wide impact.
- Guide the team in resolving routine and moderately complex technical challenges, escalating risks when necessary.
- Observability & Reliability Engineering
- Champion a culture of observability and operational excellence.
- Ensure monitoring, logging, and metrics are embedded into services.
- Leverage operational data to continuously improve system stability, performance, and reliability.
- Align monitoring strategies with organizational observability principles.
- AI & Intelligent Systems Integration
- Integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI capabilities into core applications.
- Design and implement safeguards to mitigate hallucinations and improve AI reliability.
- Build and scale agentic frameworks and AI-driven automation solutions to enhance business processes.
- Data Governance & Platform Optimization
- Influence and evolve data standards, policies, and governance practices.
- Configure, optimize, and monitor data management platforms with minimal oversight.
- Identify performance and efficiency improvements across data systems.
Required Skills & Expertise
Advanced proficiency in Java, including backend systems and automation workflows
Strong experience in Microservices Architecture and distributed systems
Expertise with Spring Boot or Micronaut, including reactive programming models
Hands-on experience with AI/LLM integration and GenAI-enabled applications
Experience with Messaging Systems such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
Proficiency with Databases, including NoSQL (Cassandra, MongoDB) and SQL (PostgreSQL)
Experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab, or similar)
Strong background in Unit & Integration Testing (JUnit, Spock, TestContainers)
Experience with Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Expertise in Containerization & Orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
Strong understanding of Monitoring & Observability tools (Grafana, ELK, Prometheus)
- Solid grasp of Event-Driven Architecture patterns in distributed environments
Preferred Qualifications
Proficiency in Python or Kotlin
Experience with Legacy System Modernization and refactoring initiatives
Knowledge of Security Best Practices, including OWASP standards and secure coding principles
- Familiarity with Agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban
Skills Required
- Advanced proficiency in Java
- Experience in Microservices Architecture and distributed systems
- Expertise with Spring Boot or Micronaut
- Hands-on experience with AI/LLM integration
- Experience with Messaging Systems such as Kafka or RabbitMQ
- Proficiency with Databases including NoSQL and SQL
- Experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines
- Strong background in Unit & Integration Testing
- Experience with Cloud Platforms
- Expertise in Containerization & Orchestration
- Understanding of Monitoring & Observability tools
Target Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Target and has not been reviewed or approved by Target.
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Healthcare Strength — Health benefits are accessible to hourly team members at relatively low hour thresholds and include no‑cost, 24/7 virtual medical care and expanded mental‑health support. This breadth is positioned as a relative strength compared to typical retail offerings.
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Retirement Support — Retirement programs include a dollar‑for‑dollar 401(k) match with immediate vesting and options like Roth 401(k) and stock purchase. These features strengthen long‑term savings for a wide range of roles.
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Parental & Family Support — Family support includes paid family leave, backup care, and reimbursements for adoption and surrogacy. These resources complement paid time off and holidays for eligible team members.
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The Company
What We Do
Target is an American retailing company providing access to a wide selection of products such as furniture, electronics, toys, and more. Target is one of the world’s most recognized brands and one of America’s leading retailers. We make Target our guests’ preferred shopping destination by offering outstanding value, inspiration, innovation and an exceptional guest experience that no other retailer can deliver. Target is committed to responsible corporate citizenship, ethical business practices, environmental stewardship and generous community support. Since 1946, we have given 5 percent of our profits back to our communities. Our goal is to work as one team to fulfill our unique brand promise to our guests, wherever and whenever they choose to shop.
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