Lead Engineer – Cloud and Compute Platform Teams

Target • Brooklyn Park, NC

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

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”. Target’s Cloud & Compute organization builds and operates the foundational platforms that power the experiences our guests, team members, partners, and engineers rely on every day. We are looking for engineers to help design, automate, scale, and evolve the cloud-native infrastructure, reliability practices, and developer-facing capabilities behind modern retail technology. Depending on the team, you may work across Kubernetes and container platforms, compute and storage, Kafka and data movement, observability, cloud management, site reliability engineering, or the cloud console experiences that make our platforms easier and safer to use. In this role, you will solve complex distributed systems and platform engineering challenges while creating secure, resilient, and self-service solutions that enable teams across Target to move faster with confidence. You will collaborate with product, engineering, and security to build reliable services, improve automation, define operational standards, strengthen observability, support production readiness, and continuously raise the bar for performance, availability, efficiency, and user experience. If you enjoy building platforms that serve many teams, operating systems at scale, learning across technical domains, and turning complex infrastructure into simple, dependable experiences, this is an opportunity to make a broad impact across Target Technology. Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Requirements

• 4-year degree or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of software development experience with at least one full cycle implementation
• Experience leading at least one full-cycle implementation of a product, platform capability, infrastructure service, or major technical initiative from design through production operation.
• Deep expertise in designing, building, and operating highly scalable, reliable, secure, and performant distributed systems.
• Strong proficiency in multiple programming languages, frameworks, or technology stacks such as Java, Go, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Kotlin, or similar.
• Broad technical experience across one or more cloud-native or platform engineering domains such as Kubernetes, containers, compute, storage, networking, Kafka or streaming platforms, observability, SRE, cloud management, platform AI, APIs, or cloud console development.
• Demonstrates ability to define technical strategy, influence architecture, and make sound engineering tradeoffs across performance, availability, scalability, security, maintainability, cost, and developer experience.
• Communicates and coordinates with project team, partners, and stakeholders
• Maintains deep technical knowledge within areas of expertise
• Stays current with new and evolving technologies via formal training and self-directed education

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team that supports a product.
• Create, own, and be responsible for the application architecture that best serves the product in its functional and non-functional needs.
• Identify and drive architectural changes to accelerate feature development or improve the quality of service.
• Design, automate, scale, and evolve cloud-native infrastructure, reliability practices, and developer-facing capabilities.
• Solve complex distributed systems and platform engineering challenges.
• Create secure, resilient, and self-service solutions that enable teams across Target to move faster with confidence.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and security to build reliable services, improve automation, define operational standards, strengthen observability, support production readiness, and continuously raise the bar for performance, availability, efficiency, and user experience.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health benefits and programs (medical, vision, dental, life insurance)
• 401(k)
• Employee discount
• Short term disability
• Long term disability
• Paid sick leave
• Paid national holidays
• Paid vacation

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree