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 :
As a Principal Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will provide technical leadership and set the long-term architectural direction for how data is managed, governed, and observed across Target. This role is focused on influence at scale - shaping platforms, standards, and engineering practices that enable teams across the enterprise to build trusted, reliable, and compliant data products.
You will operate at the intersection of architecture, engineering excellence, and organizational alignment, ensuring the data platform foundation can support the scale, complexity, and regulatory needs of a large omni-channel retailer.
What you’ll do:
· Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for Target’s Data Platform.
· Influence platform strategy across multiple teams and domains by setting standards, patterns, and best practices for data management, governance, metadata, lineage, data quality, and observability.
· Partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and data teams to align platform capabilities with business and regulatory requirements.
· Evaluate trade-offs holistically across systems, balancing scalability, reliability, usability, and operational excellence.
· Lead design reviews for complex, cross-cutting initiatives and guide teams toward cohesive, long-term solutions.
· Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, raising the overall bar for technical decision-making and platform thinking.
· Serve as a technical thought leader, anticipating future needs and evolving the platform to support Target’s long-term data strategy.
About you
· Deep experience designing and building large-scale data platforms in complex enterprise environments.
· Strong expertise in data management and governance concepts, including metadata, lineage, data quality, and observability.
· Solid understanding of data fundamentals and distributed systems.
· Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.
· Experience establishing platform foundations that enable consistency, trust, and scale across diverse data use cases.
· Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical partners.
· A systems thinker who can see the “sum of the parts” and drive cohesive, long-term platform outcomes.
Skills Required
- 4 year degree or equivalent experience
- 12+ years of experience in technology development or services
- 4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction
- Strong understanding of systems programming and control languages
- Excellent verbal, written, and presentation communication skills
- Experience in Java/ J2EE, SQL/ No-SQL technologies
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.
