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 lead engineer, you serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team that supports a product. You create, own and are responsible for the application architecture that best serves the product in its functional and non-functional needs. You identify and drive architectural changes to accelerate feature development or improve the quality of service (or both). You have deep and broad engineering skills and are capable of standing up an architecture in its whole on your own, but you choose to influence a wider team by acting as a "force multiplier". Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.
Lead Engineer – Managed Containers
We are looking for a Lead Engineer with strong platform engineering experience in designing, building, and operating cloud-native applications and microservices on Kubernetes-based platforms. The ideal candidate will have expertise in modern application development frameworks, cloud-native technologies, and automation-first engineering practices.
Required Skills
Strong software development experience with Java/Kotlin and frameworks such as Micronaut or Spring Boot.
Experience with Go (Golang) and/or Groovy/Ratpack is a plus.
Strong understanding of microservices architecture, API design, and distributed systems.
Experience implementing GitOps practices using tools such as Argo CD or Flux.
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and modern software delivery practices.
Hands-on experience developing, deploying, and operating applications on Kubernetes.
Experience with caching technologies and SQL databases.
Experience with public cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP); experience with AWS or Azure is also valued.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Kubernetes deployment tools, including Terraform, Helm, and/or Kustomize.
Experience with observability solutions, including metrics, logging, monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing.
Responsibilities
Design, develop, and maintain scalable cloud-native platform solutions for hosting applications and services.
Build, deploy, and manage containerized workloads on Kubernetes platforms.
Develop APIs and microservices using Java, Kotlin, and/or Go.
Implement GitOps-based deployment and operational practices.
Troubleshoot and resolve platform and application operational issues.
Improve application observability, reliability, performance, and scalability.
Architect infrastructure solutions that enable automation, self-service provisioning, resiliency, security, compliance, and operational excellence while delivering an exceptional Guest and Team Member experience.
Collaborate with platform, infrastructure, and product engineering teams to deliver secure, scalable, and high-quality cloud-native solutions.
Preferred Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of experience in software engineering, cloud engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering.
Skills Required
- Bachelor degree or equivalent experience
- 9+ years in software development, cloud engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering with cloud focus
- Deep domain knowledge of cloud platforms (account/project management, compute, storage, databases, networking, serverless, IAM, security, observability, cost management)
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane or similar)
- Experience developing APIs, automation, and tooling using Go, Python, and Bash scripting
- Familiarity with container and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, GKE)
- Experience with observability, monitoring, logging, and tracing tools (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, Cloud Operations, Splunk, Datadog or similar)
- Familiarity with Linux distributions, virtual machines, containers, networking, DNS, and load balancing
- Experience building highly scalable distributed systems, internal developer platforms, automation frameworks, or shared cloud platform services
- Strong communication and coordination with project teams, application teams, partners, and stakeholders
- Ability to lead architecture, set standards, and drive platform-level best practices
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.
Target Insights
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.
