Senior Engineering Manager - Observability

Target•Brooklyn Park, MN

3d•$132,000 - $238,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Working at Target means shaping experiences for hundreds of millions of guests while operating one of the largest retail technology platforms in the world. We are a Fortune 50 company with more than 450,000 team members globally. Technology is one of Target’s top four enterprise priorities. It plays an outsized role in powering growth, speed, reliability, and innovation across the company. From merchandising and supply chain to stores and digital, our technology platforms directly enable the most critical outcomes for 2026 and beyond. Target Tech builds and operates the intelligence powered architecture that fuels these outcomes. Our teams design scalable platforms, modern data ecosystems, and resilient infrastructure that allow thousands of engineers to deliver secure, high performing systems at enterprise scale. About the Observability Team Reliability is foundational to delivering on Target’s purpose. Every register scan, Drive Up order, search result, inventory update, and fulfillment workflow depends on systems that are resilient, measurable, and continuously improving. The Observability team builds and operates the enterprise platform that enables engineering teams to understand, measure, and improve the reliability and performance of their products. We provide standardized telemetry, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, system maps, and operational insights across more than 20,000 services. Our platform enables: Enterprise scale metrics, logs, and traces built on OpenTelemetry standards Real time system maps and dependency graphs across complex service ecosystems SLO management, error budget tracking, and reliability showback Integrated alerting, on call alignment, and actionable operational insights AI driven root cause analysis and automated remediation capabilities We operate at massive scale in 24 by 7 production environments. Technologies commonly used across the team include Golang, Kubernetes, Kafka, ClickHouse, InfluxDB, Grafana, and React that support high volume telemetry pipelines. We are moving beyond traditional monitoring. Our ambition is to build an intelligent, agent enabled observability platform that proactively detects degradation, explains system behavior, and recommends or executes recovery actions before guests are impacted. About the Role As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead one of three engineering teams delivering enterprise observability capabilities. You will partner closely with peer managers, product, and a Principal Engineer to shape the technical roadmap and deliver a unified, intelligent reliability platform for Target Tech. At Target scale, you will lead engineers solving distributed systems and reliability challenges that are not documented in standard playbooks. Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity in ambiguous environments. Why This Role Is Compelling This role sits at the center of one of Target’s top enterprise priorities. You will directly shape how reliability, performance, and operational intelligence are delivered across the company. You will: Influence how thousands of engineers build and operate software Shape the evolution from reactive monitoring to AI assisted and autonomous reliability Protect revenue, brand trust, and guest experience through resilient platform design Lead engineers solving distributed systems challenges at enterprise retail scale Play a visible role in advancing Target’s intelligence powered architecture If you are motivated by scale, impact, and deep technical challenges, this role offers all three. What Success Looks Like Within 12 to 18 months, you will have: Increased SLO coverage and reliability visibility across production applications Reduced mean time to detect and mean time to engage during critical incidents Expanded standard telemetry adoption and improved operational data quality Delivered measurable improvements in developer experience for reliability workflows Built a strong, inclusive, and accountable engineering culture aligned to enterprise outcomes About You You are a technical leader first and a people leader always. You are comfortable engaging in architecture discussions, telemetry design, distributed systems, and failure analysis while coaching engineers and managers to grow in scope and influence.

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience, with 1–3 years of people leadership or equivalent delivery ownership.
Proven experience building and operating cloud-native, distributed systems and high-performance APIs at scale.
Strong background in resilient production architecture, reliability engineering, and raising engineering standards.
Demonstrated product leadership (roadmaps, OKRs, migration execution) and experience with contract-driven or schema-governed platforms.
Track record of building and developing high-performing teams within large enterprise environments.
Ability to influence cross-domain stakeholders and drive alignment across complex ecosystems.
Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts for diverse audiences.
Deep understanding of Agile, CI/CD, and incremental value delivery.

Nice To Haves

knowledge of Target infrastructure and platform services
vendor management experience
leading geographically distributed teams
Coaching and mentoring engineers on architecture and modern engineering practices
Supporting and operating 24 by 7 business critical capabilities
Building and operating large scale telemetry or data intensive distributed systems
Designing and deploying scalable APIs and microservices
Instrumenting products with metrics, logs, and traces to make them observable by default
Utilizing version control systems such as Git
Working in Linux or Unix based environments
Communicating complex technical solutions clearly across diverse audiences
Working effectively across multiple teams in a product-oriented environment

Responsibilities

Building and leading a high performing team of platform and full stack engineers
Delivering mission critical, highly available observability systems
Scaling telemetry pipelines and analytics across thousands of applications
Embedding reliability and operational excellence directly into developer workflows
Representing your team in cross domain architecture and enterprise planning forums

Benefits

In addition to your pay, Target cares about and invests in you as a team member, so that you can take care of yourself and your family.
Target offers eligible team members and their dependents comprehensive health benefits and programs, which may include medical, vision, dental, life insurance and more, to help you and your family take care of your whole selves.
Other benefits for eligible team members include 401(k), employee discount, short term disability, long term disability, paid sick leave, paid national holidays, and paid vacation.
Find competitive benefits from financial and education to well-being and beyond at https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.
Our Benefits We care about and invest in you as a team member, so that you can take care of yourself and your family.
Target offers eligible team members and their dependents comprehensive health benefits and programs, which may include medical, vision, dental, life insurance and more, to help you and your family take care of your whole selves.
Other benefits for eligible team members include 401(k), employee discount, short term disability, long term disability, paid sick leave, paid national holidays, and paid vacation.
Find competitive benefits from financial and education to well-being and beyond at https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.

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