Lead Engineer - Cloud Security (Software Developer)

Target • Brooklyn Park, NC

2d • $132,000 - $238,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Target is hiring a Lead Engineer to serve as the senior software engineering lead and hands-on owner of the Cloud Security team's software portfolio. The role leads technical direction, standards, and the roadmap for services that aggregate, attribute, enrich, and distribute cloud security findings so product and platform teams can act on them. The work partners closely with platform engineers who operate cloud security controls and with consumers across Target’s enterprise security and engineering ecosystem.

The position owns the design, development, and production operation of the findings pipeline and adjacent backend services. This includes integrating signals from cloud security controls, improving attribution and signal quality, and connecting services to enterprise remediation, governance, and developer workflows. The role sets service objectives, maintains reliability and operational health, drives multi-quarter initiatives, and invests in automation and developer experience. It also establishes engineering practices, mentors software engineers, represents technical work to stakeholders, and evaluates emerging technologies, including AI-assisted engineering tools.

The role is based at Target HQ in Minnesota and operates under a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day arrangement, with work performed onsite and virtually according to role, team, and task needs. Work must be performed within the country of the primary work location unless otherwise prescribed by Target.

Requirements

• A four-year degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including a strong track record leading design and delivery of complex, platform-oriented backend systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot, and strong fluency in at least one additional modern language.
• Demonstrated experience as a tech lead owning an enterprise-scale software capability end-to-end and setting technical direction for other engineers.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating distributed, event-driven, and data-intensive backend services in production.
• Strong experience designing RESTful APIs, service-to-service integrations, and event streams used by other teams.
• Experience building and operating findings, event, or telemetry pipelines that aggregate multiple sources, deduplicate and enrich signals, and route them downstream with SLAs.
• Experience improving signal-to-noise in findings or alert pipelines through deduplication, correlation, suppression, ownership attribution, and SLA-based remediation.
• Track record operating production services with SLOs, on-call coverage, change management, and continuous-improvement loops.
• Experience driving multi-quarter roadmaps from problem framing through rollout, adoption, and steady-state operation.
• Ability to make and defend pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions.
• Strong experience with relational databases, cloud-based data warehouses, schema design, data migrations, and data lifecycle considerations for security services.
• Experience with event-streaming technologies such as Kafka or Pub/Sub.
• Hands-on public cloud experience; GCP is preferred, and AWS or Azure experience is also valued.
• Experience with containers and orchestration, including Docker and Kubernetes, at enterprise scale.
• Strong understanding of automated unit, integration, contract, regression, and end-to-end testing, and commitment to shipping tested code.
• Strong understanding of observability practices and tools for metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and SLOs.
• Hands-on experience integrating backend services with developer workflows such as CI/CD, source control, and ticketing in a large engineering organization.
• Strong understanding of secure software development practices and modern cloud-native architectures.
• Solid understanding of AI/ML and emerging engineering considerations, including responsible use of AI-assisted and agentic tools such as Claude Code, OpenCode, or Codex.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills with security and product engineering teams, including alignment on requirements, rollout plans, and operational ownership.
• Ability to communicate work, risks, and tradeoffs effectively to senior leadership and staff engineers.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including presentation abilities.
• Curiosity, bias for action, and a builder's mindset.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in cybersecurity, cloud security, or another highly available and risk-sensitive production environment.
• Familiarity with CSPM, CNAPP, IaC scanning, admission control, SSPM, or cloud workload protection tooling and the findings they produce.
• Experience integrating with security analytics, SIEM, SOAR, detection, or response platforms.
• Experience with policy-as-code such as Rego and infrastructure as code such as Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior software engineering lead and hands-on owner of the Cloud Security team's software portfolio, setting technical direction, standards, and roadmap.
• Lead design, development, and operation of the finding pipeline, including ingesting, deduplicating, normalizing, enriching, and routing cloud security signals to remediation and governance workflows.
• Monitor the completeness, freshness, and reliability of security data feeds, and use remediation feedback to improve signal quality.
• Design, build, and operate scalable backend services using Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot, with suitable event-driven or request/response architectures.
• Own ownership attribution end-to-end, including data models, sources of truth, reconciliation logic, and feedback loops.
• Reduce findings noise through deduplication, cross-source correlation, suppression logic, and enrichment.
• Build integrations and data contracts connecting team services with SIEM/SOAR, remediation and governance workflows, ticketing, source control, CI/CD, and internal developer platforms.
• Partner with security, infrastructure, governance, and product/platform teams on telemetry and finding handoffs.
• Operate production services, owning availability, performance, observability, capacity, deploy cadence, outage response, SLOs, and on-call participation.
• Collaborate with platform engineers on shared API and data-contract design for cloud security controls and the software that consumes their findings.
• Partner with Detection & Response on detections and software support for cloud incident response.
• Drive multi-quarter initiatives from problem framing and scoping through design, build, rollout, adoption, and steady-state operation.
• Make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions and manage the technical lifecycle of service dependencies, libraries, frameworks, and third-party components.
• Treat the software portfolio as a product by investing in automation, self-service, and platform thinking to scale coverage and remediation.
• Reduce toil through paved roads, better defaults, and faster developer feedback; own the developer experience of APIs and services.
• Establish and improve engineering standards for APIs, event streams, data models, testing, observability, resiliency, secure development, and CI/CD.
• Guide database schema evolution, data migrations, cloud data warehouse design, API versioning, and backward-compatible platform changes.
• Communicate roadmap, risk reduction, operational health, and tradeoffs to senior leadership and staff engineers.
• Mentor software engineers and raise standards for code quality, testing, code review, on-call hygiene, postmortems, and operational excellence.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools, and apply them responsibly to improve engineering quality and delivery.

Benefits

• Eligible team members and their dependents may receive medical, vision, dental, and life insurance benefits.
• 401(k).
• Employee discount.
• Short-term disability and long-term disability.
• Paid sick leave.
• Paid national holidays.
• Paid vacation.
• Additional financial, education, and well-being benefits may be available to eligible team members.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior