Sr Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) AI Platforms team

Target • Brooklyn Park, NC

22h • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Engineer on Target’s AI Platforms Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team, you will accelerate adoption of Target’s enterprise AI platforms by working directly with engineering and product teams to solve complex, high-value AI problems. The role operates at the intersection of AI engineering, platform engineering, and product development, bringing technical expertise to teams building AI-powered experiences.

You will help teams move from experimentation to production by designing and implementing solutions, integrating enterprise AI platform capabilities, and establishing scalable engineering patterns. Insights from real-world implementations will be used to improve the broader AI platform and builder experience, including by turning recurring challenges and successful patterns into reusable components, APIs, SDKs, frameworks, tooling, reference implementations, and self-service capabilities.

As a senior engineering specialist, you will help shape application architecture and translate abstract architecture into concrete designs and implementation. You will independently design and implement architecture, apply software engineering patterns to build robust and scalable systems, and influence other engineers through software designs, implementation guidance, code reviews, and technical mentorship.

The position operates in a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day arrangement: work is performed both onsite at the assigned Target HQ Minnesota location and virtually, depending on role, team, and daily tasks. Work duties cannot be performed outside the country of the primary work location unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Requirements

• A four-year degree or equivalent experience.
• At least 5 years of software development experience with strong hands-on engineering and programming skills.
• Experience designing, building, testing, deploying, and operating production-grade applications, services, or distributed systems.
• Experience building AI-enabled applications and working with technologies such as LLMs, model APIs, agentic frameworks, retrieval/context patterns, tool integration, or other modern AI capabilities.
• Strong proficiency in one or more modern programming languages and experience developing services and applications using modern frameworks and engineering practices.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs, SDKs, libraries, frameworks, or platform capabilities.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, APIs, scalability, reliability, performance, security, and production operations.
• Experience with cloud-native development, containers, orchestration, CI/CD, observability, testing, debugging, and operational monitoring.
• Ability to understand ambiguous requirements and translate them into concrete technical designs and working software.
• Ability to work across the full engineering lifecycle, from rapid prototyping and experimentation to hardened production systems.
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and balance delivery speed with scalability, maintainability, operational excellence, and long-term platform needs.
• Strong problem-solving skills, including diagnosing complex technical and operational issues and preventing their recurrence.
• Experience collaborating directly with product teams and engineers and working across organizational and technical boundaries.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and influence design and implementation decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, provide technical guidance, and raise engineering standards.
• Maintains technical knowledge in areas of expertise and stays current with evolving AI and software engineering technologies through formal training and self-directed learning.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with engineering and product teams to design, build, and productionize AI-powered applications and experiences using Target’s enterprise AI platform.
• Develop production-grade solutions using generative AI, LLMs, agentic architectures, enterprise context and retrieval, model APIs, tools, and platform services.
• Understand ambiguous business and engineering problems, translate them into technical designs, and build working solutions that demonstrate measurable value.
• Lead technical implementation across exploration, prototyping, architecture, development, evaluation, deployment, observability, and production operations.
• Apply software engineering and distributed systems principles to ensure AI solutions are scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, and production-ready.
• Work with AI Platform teams to integrate existing platform capabilities and identify gaps encountered while building real-world applications.
• Identify patterns across FDE engagements and help turn repeatable solutions into reusable platform capabilities, APIs, SDKs, libraries, frameworks, templates, and reference architectures.
• Improve the AI builder experience across development, experimentation, testing, evaluation, debugging, deployment, and production operations.
• Build reference implementations and examples demonstrating effective patterns for adopting enterprise AI capabilities.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, models, and developer tooling through research and proof-of-concept activities; recommend approaches based on scalability, maintainability, security, and cost.
• Lead code reviews, design reviews, testing, debugging, and architecture discussions while maintaining high engineering quality and operational standards.
• Diagnose complex production and integration issues, identify systemic causes, and develop solutions to prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate across platform engineering, application engineering, product, architecture, data science, and other teams.
• Share technical learnings, patterns, and best practices with the broader engineering community and help other engineers adopt them.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance through software designs, implementation guidance, and technical discussions.

Benefits

• Eligible team members and their dependents may receive comprehensive health benefits and programs, including medical, vision, dental, and 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