Senior Engineer – Apply For CircleCard

Target • Brooklyn Park, NC

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Engineer serves as a specialist on the engineering team supporting Target’s Circle Card application experience. The role helps develop and shape application architecture, translates architectural concepts into concrete designs, and applies software engineering patterns to build robust, scalable systems. The engineer contributes technical expertise through design proposals, design and implementation feedback, problem-solving, operational issue triage, and efforts to prevent recurring issues.

The Apply for Circle Card team creates a seamless application experience, with a goal of delivering instant approve-or-decline decisions while increasing successful Circle Card applications. The team also supports in-store balance paydowns for Guest Circle Cards and tracks key Circle Card metrics. It owns core backend systems for the Circle Card journey and also contributes frontend experience in store registry.

The Senior Engineer leads engineering work across AI and services. This includes building production AI-powered applications, autonomous and agentic systems, domain-specific agents, multi-agent workflows, RAG solutions, and reusable AI components. The role also designs, develops, and maintains scalable AI-ready services using Kotlin, Java, and Micronaut; builds secure APIs and event-driven systems; and supports distributed systems, databases, operational excellence, and cross-functional product delivery. The position is hybrid/flex, requiring work both onsite at the assigned Target HQ Minnesota location and virtually according to role, team, and task needs. Work may not be performed outside the country of the primary work location unless otherwise prescribed by Target.

Requirements

• Four-year degree or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 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.
• 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, RAG, tool calling, memory management, orchestration patterns, and AI evaluation.
• Experience optimizing AI applications for quality, latency, token efficiency, and inference cost, and 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 with distributed systems, REST 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, including experience mentoring engineers, leading design discussions, and driving engineering best practices.
• Passion for applying emerging AI technologies to complex engineering and business challenges.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal.
• Experience creating reusable AI workflows or “skills” for efficient, repeatable engineering tasks.
• Experience working on the Target Register platform.

Responsibilities

• Apply and maintain knowledge of current and emerging technologies in the relevant technology domains, and evaluate new technologies for viability, maintainability, and cost of ownership.
• Initiate and execute research and proof-of-concept activities for new technologies.
• Manage total product financials and forecasting.
• Lead service design, lifecycle management, and total cost of ownership.
• Lead code reviews, design reviews, testing, and debugging at the application level.
• Lead functional design and architecture discussions using process flows and system diagrams to inform design decisions.
• Participate in construction, automation, and implementation activities, ensuring architectural and operational requirements and best practices are met.
• Provide technical oversight and coach others in resolving 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.
• Use AI-assisted software development tools throughout design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and code reviews.
• Validate AI-generated code and technical recommendations through testing, peer review, and established engineering practices.
• Design and build production AI applications using approved AI platforms, frameworks, and large language models.
• Design, build, and deploy autonomous and agentic AI systems that support reasoning, planning, tool orchestration, memory management, and multi-step workflows.
• Develop domain-specific AI agents and multi-agent workflows using modern orchestration frameworks.
• Design prompt engineering and context engineering strategies; build RAG solutions using enterprise knowledge sources, vector search, and semantic retrieval.
• Optimize AI applications for response quality, latency, throughput, token utilization, and inference cost.
• Implement AI evaluation frameworks and responsible AI, security, privacy, governance, and observability practices.
• Build reusable AI components, frameworks, libraries, workflows, and engineering accelerators.
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities, lead proof-of-concept initiatives, and recommend adoption strategies that deliver business value.
• Partner with engineering teams to integrate AI capabilities into products, platforms, and software development workflows.
• Design, develop, and maintain scalable AI-ready services using Kotlin, Java, and Micronaut.
• Build secure, high-performance REST APIs and event-driven services for 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 and highly available services with fault tolerance, scalability, and operational excellence.
• Lead technical design discussions, architecture reviews, code reviews, and implementation planning.
• Improve observability through OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging, and production monitoring.
• Continuously improve application performance, scalability, resiliency, observability, and operational health.
• Partner with Product Management, UX, Architecture, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to deliver customer-focused solutions.

Benefits

• Eligible team members and their dependents may receive comprehensive health benefits, which may include medical, vision, dental, and life insurance.
• 401(k).
• Employee discount.
• Short-term disability.
• 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