Principal Engineer – Store Optimization

Target • Brooklyn Park, MN

19h • Hybrid

About The Position

Store Optimization is the backbone of system-directed execution across Target stores, enabling intelligent task orchestration, routing, batching, and prioritization at enterprise scale. This ecosystem spans deeply interconnected capabilities including Task Ingestion, Task Optimization, Task Prioritization, and Maps & Routing. As a Principal Engineer you define and drive unified architectural direction across this portfolio, ensuring alignment between near-term delivery and long-term platform scalability. This role will enable faster innovation while maintaining system integrity, resilience, and extensibility, shaping a durable, enterprise-grade platform for store and fulfillment operations. Store Optimization is evolving into a unified execution platform powering system-directed work across 2,000+ stores and expanding fulfillment workflows. Architectural decisions made now will define how this platform scales enterprise wide. This is a highly interdependent system where batching, prioritization and ingestion directly impact routing efficiency, SL adherence and downstream optimization. At this scale, strong architectural cohesion is critical to ensure consistency, reuse, and long-term sustainability. This role establishes principal-level ownership to guide cross-product decisions, prevent fragmentation, and enable enterprise-wide alignment.

Requirements

• 4-year degree or equivalent experience; continued learning in evolving technologies
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years setting technical strategy across teams or domains
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architecture (Kafka), and scalable platform design
• Strong hands-on experience with Java/Kotlin or Python; building API-first services (Spring Boot or Micronaut)
• Experience designing and operating cloud-native systems using Kubernetes and Docker
• Strong understanding of data systems (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) and observability (metrics, logging, tracing)
• Experience building and integrating AI/GenAI systems (LLMs, RAG, prompting, evaluation, guardrails)
• Proven ability to productionize AI systems, including performance, reliability, and enterprise integration
• Strong ability to translate business goals into technical strategy and drive cross-team architectural alignment
• Proven leadership and communication skills, with ability to influence senior stakeholders

Nice To Haves

• Experience with optimization, routing, or decisioning systems at scale
• Familiarity with graph algorithms, heuristics, or tools like OR-Tools
• Experience with agentic workflows, multi-agent systems, or human-in-the-loop orchestration
• Experience with GenAI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), vector databases, or semantic search
• Exposure to graph databases (e.g., Neo4j), knowledge graphs, or streaming data systems

Responsibilities

• Define and drive unified architecture across Task Ingestion, Task Prioritization, Task Optimization, and Routing
• Lead the evolution toward goal-driven, intelligent task orchestration aligned to business outcomes (e.g., labor efficiency, sales recovery, SLA adherence)
• Establish multi-objective optimization frameworks to balance competing business priorities
• Simplify and standardize shared capabilities to reduce duplication and technical debt
• Ensure end-to-end system integrity across interconnected workflows
• Embed observability, guardrails, and explainability into AI-driven systems
• Partner across engineering, product, and data science to drive scalable, reusable platform design
• Align architectural decisions to measurable business and operational outcomes

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: Principal
• Education Level: Associate degree