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

Target • Brooklyn Park, MN

9h • $98,000 - $176,000 • 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 partnering directly with engineering and product teams to solve complex, high-value AI problems. You will work at the intersection of AI engineering, platform engineering, and product development, helping teams move AI-powered experiences from experimentation to production by designing and implementing solutions, integrating platform capabilities, and establishing scalable engineering patterns.

You will learn from real-world implementations, identify recurring technical challenges, and work with platform teams to turn effective 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, translate architecture into concrete designs, implement robust and scalable systems, and influence engineers through design guidance, code reviews, and technical mentorship.

The role is hybrid/flex, with work performed both onsite at the assigned Target HQ location in Minnesota and virtually, depending on role, team, and daily tasks. Work duties may not be performed outside the country of the primary work location unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Job duties may change based on 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 using 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 interpret ambiguous requirements, rapidly understand problem spaces, and translate them into technical designs and working software.
• Ability to work across the full engineering lifecycle, from rapid prototyping and experimentation through 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 across organizational and technical boundaries.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and influence design and implementation decisions.
• Ability to mentor engineers, provide technical guidance, and raise team 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 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.
• Translate ambiguous business and engineering problems into technical designs and 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 build scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, production-ready AI solutions.
• Work with AI Platform teams to integrate existing platform capabilities and identify gaps encountered in real-world application development.
• Identify recurring patterns across FDE engagements and help turn them 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 that demonstrate effective adoption of enterprise AI capabilities.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, models, and developer tools through research and proof-of-concept activities, and recommend suitable 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, determine systemic causes, and develop solutions that prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate across platform engineering, application engineering, product, architecture, data science, and other teams.
• Share technical learnings, patterns, and best practices with the engineering community and help other engineers adopt them.
• Provide software design and implementation guidance, technical mentorship, and influence engineering standards.

Benefits

• Eligible team members and their dependents may receive comprehensive health benefits and programs, 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
• Financial, education, and well-being benefits

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior