Senior AI Engineer – Apply For CircleCard

Target•Brooklyn Park, MN

2d•$98,000 - $176,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Engineer, you serve as a specialist in the engineering team that supports the product. You help develop and gain insight into the application architecture. You can distill an abstract architecture into concrete design and influence the implementation. You show expertise in applying the appropriate software engineering patterns to build robust and scalable systems. You are an expert in programming and apply your skills in developing the product. You have the skills to design and implement the architecture on your own but choose to influence your fellow engineers by proposing software designs, providing feedback on software designs and/or implementation. You show good problem-solving skills and can help the team in triaging operational issues. You leverage your expertise in eliminating repeat occurrences. The Apply for Circle Card (AFCC) team is responsible for creating a seamless and efficient Circle Card application experience for our guests. Our primary goal is to deliver an instant Approve or Decline decision while increasing the number of successful Circle Card applications. Beyond application processing, we also support in-store balance paydowns for Guest Circle Cards and maintain internal tracking of key Circle Card metrics. What sets our team apart is our deep expertise and ownership of core backend systems powering the Circle Card journey, along with frontend experience in store registry. This breadth allows us to maintain a holistic view and innovate effectively across the guest experience. Use your skills, experience and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals. As a Sr. Engineer, you’ll take the lead as you. Use your technology acumen to apply and maintain knowledge of current and emerging technologies within specialized area(s) of the technology domain. Evaluate new technologies and participate in decision-making, accounting for several factors such as viability within Target’s technical environment, maintainability, and cost of ownership. Initiate and execute research and proof-of-concept activities for new technologies. Manage total product, financials and forecasting. Lead the design, lifecycle management, and total cost of ownership of services. Lead and conduct code review, design review, testing, and debugging activities at the application level. Lead functional design and architecture discussions with understanding of process flows and system diagrams to enable design decisions. Participate in routine and non-routine construction, automation, and implementation activities, ensuring successful implementation with architectural and operational requirements and best practices met. Provide technical oversight and coach others to resolve complex and severe technical issues. Lead disaster recovery activities and contribute to disaster recovery planning. Embed data quality protocols throughout data acquisition, processing, storage, and operational use. Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Requirements

4 years of degree or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of software engineering experience building enterprise-scale applications and backend systems.
Hands-on experience designing and deploying production AI applications, AI-powered tools, or agentic systems using modern Large Language Models (LLMs).
Experience building autonomous or multi-agent workflows using technologies such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, Google ADK, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent orchestration frameworks.
Strong understanding of AI application architecture, including Prompt Engineering, Context Engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), tool calling, memory management, orchestration patterns, and AI evaluation.
Experience optimizing AI applications for quality, latency, token efficiency, and inference cost while implementing responsible AI, governance, and observability practices.
Proficiency in Python for AI application development, automation, or AI tooling.
Expert-level proficiency in Kotlin and Java, with experience building microservices using Micronaut and/or Spring Boot.
Strong experience designing distributed systems, RESTful APIs, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
Experience building highly available, resilient, secure, and observable production services.
Strong communication, collaboration, and technical leadership skills with experience mentoring engineers, leading design discussions, and driving engineering best practices.
Passion for applying emerging AI technologies to solve complex engineering and business challenges.

Nice To Haves

Worked on with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal
Experience creating reusable AI workflows or “skills” to enable efficient, repeatable engineering tasks
Worked on Target Register platform

Responsibilities

Leverage AI-assisted software development tools throughout the software development lifecycle, including solution design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and code reviews.
Collaborate effectively with AI coding assistants and enterprise AI platforms to improve engineering productivity while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, architecture, and maintainability.
Apply sound engineering judgment to validate AI-generated code and technical recommendations through testing, peer reviews, and established software engineering practices.
Design and build production AI-powered applications using Target-approved AI platforms, frameworks, and Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve engineering and business problems.
Design, build, and deploy production-grade autonomous and agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool orchestration, memory management, and multi-step workflow execution.
Develop domain-specific AI agents and multi-agent workflows using modern orchestration frameworks to automate engineering processes and enhance retail and enterprise experiences.
Design and implement prompt engineering and Context Engineering strategies to improve application quality, reliability, and relevance.
Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions leveraging enterprise knowledge sources, vector search technologies, and semantic retrieval.
Optimize AI applications for response quality, latency, throughput, token utilization, and inference cost.
Implement AI evaluation frameworks and apply responsible AI, security, privacy, governance, and observability best practices.
Build reusable AI components, frameworks, libraries, workflows, and engineering accelerators that improve developer productivity.
Evaluate emerging AI capabilities, lead proof-of-concept initiatives, and recommend adoption strategies that deliver measurable business value.
Partner across engineering teams to integrate AI capabilities into products, platforms, and software development workflows.
Design, develop, and maintain highly scalable AI-ready services using Kotlin, Java, and Micronaut.
Build secure, high-performance RESTful APIs and event-driven services supporting high-volume retail and financial workloads.
Design distributed systems using Kafka, asynchronous messaging, distributed caching, and cloud-native architecture patterns.
Design and optimize PostgreSQL databases, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization, and transactional integrity.
Build resilient, highly available services with strong fault tolerance, scalability, and operational excellence.
Lead technical design discussions, architecture reviews, code reviews, and implementation planning.
Improve platform observability using OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging, and production monitoring.
Continuously improve application performance, scalability, resiliency, observability, and operational health.
Partner closely with Product Management, UX, Architecture, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to deliver customer-focused solutions.