Lead Full-Stack Engineer -- Advanced AI

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.

JOIN TARGET AS A LEAD FULL STACK ENGINEER - ADVANCED AI

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.

About the role

Target’s Advanced AI team builds end-to-end AI/ML systems that create meaningful business value across the enterprise. These systems may be powered by LLMs, classical machine learning, or deep learning models, and are designed as scalable, reliable, production-grade applications, including agentic architectures where they add clear value.

As a Lead Full-Stack Engineer for Advanced AI, you will help design, build, deploy, and maintain the application layers, services, APIs, and user experiences that bring AI/ML capabilities into core business workflows. You will work closely with AI/ML Engineers, Data Scientists, product partners, platform teams, security teams, and business stakeholders to turn complex AI capabilities into practical, intuitive, and scalable applications.

In this role, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for full-stack engineering initiatives across Advanced AI applications. You will contribute to architecture and design decisions, build maintainable production-quality code, design and develop APIs and services, create user-facing application experiences, and help establish strong engineering practices across development, testing, deployment, observability, documentation, and ongoing support. You will help ensure applications are secure, reliable, accessible, performant, maintainable, and aligned to Target’s enterprise standards for infrastructure, platform architecture, data handling, and operational readiness.

You will also partner with AI/ML Engineers, Lead and Principal Engineers, and engineering leaders to shape technical approaches, identify implementation risks, resolve roadblocks, and support the evolution of reusable application patterns for AI-powered products. This role requires strong product thinking, curiosity, and continuous learning, including staying current with modern full-stack engineering practices and developments in AI, LLM-powered applications, agentic systems, and enterprise AI patterns. A successful Lead Full-Stack Engineer will help deliver production-grade AI applications that create measurable business value while raising the technical quality and capability of the broader team.

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

About you:

• 4-year degree or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including experience building and operating production applications
• Strong experience building full-stack applications, including user-facing experiences, backend services, APIs, integrations, and data-driven workflows
• Strong proficiency with modern backend and frontend development
• Experience with Python is strongly preferred and experience with TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Kotlin or Go
• Experience with modern web application frameworks, API design, service-oriented architectures, data integration patterns, and production application development
• Experience building applications that integrate with AI/ML capabilities, including model APIs, LLM-powered workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic systems, intelligent automation, or data science outputs
• Strong understanding of system design, application architecture, security, performance, scalability, reliability, accessibility, observability, testing, and production deployment considerations
• Experience building scalable, maintainable, and well-tested services, APIs, data pipelines, integrations, applications, or platforms
• Experience with version control, CI/CD, code review practices, documentation, operational monitoring, and production support
• Ability to translate ambiguous business and user needs into clear technical approaches and collaborate with cross-functional partners to deliver practical solutions
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to engineers, AI/ML Engineers, Data Scientists, product partners, business stakeholders and leaders
• Ability to mentor engineers, contribute to technical direction, and raise the quality of full-stack engineering practices within a team
• Self-driven and results-oriented, with strong ownership, sound judgment, and the ability to move quickly while maintaining high technical standards
• Collaborative team player with a commitment to continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and building reliable AI-powered applications that create business value

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.