Job Details

The pay range is $132,000.00 - $286,000.00 Pay is based on several factors which vary based on position. These include labor markets and in some instances may include education, work experience and certifications. 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 . About us: Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision tolife through our values and culture.Learn more about Target here (. Join Merchandising Engineering, a globally distributed engineering team building the systems at the very heart of Target retail. We power Targetu2019s core merchandising capabilitiesu2014Item, Price, Promo, Merchandising Optimization, Space Planning, Vendor Experience, and our growing Owned Brand portfoliou2014at massive scale. Our teams solve complex, high impact problems using cutting edge technologies, including advanced AI and machine learning, to deliver intelligent, data driven experiences to millions of guests and thousands of merchants. This is a team where engineers shape the future of retail technology, influence enterprise wide strategy, and grow their careers by working on platforms that directly define how Target curates, prices, plans, and delivers the products our guests love. As a Lead Engineer, you serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team that supports a product. You create, own and are responsible for the application architecture that best serves the product in its functional and non-functional needs. You identify and drive architectural changes to accelerate feature development or improve the quality of service (or both). You have deep and broad engineering skills and are capable of standing up an architecture in its whole on your own, but you choose to influence a wider team by acting as a u201cforce multiplieru201d. About this Team: Use your skills, experience and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals. As a Lead Engineer, youu2019ll take the lead as youu2026 u2022 Design and implement autonomous AI agents capable of multi-step reasoning, task planning, tool usage, memory/state management, and iterative execution. u2022 Lead development of multi-agent coordination frameworks, agent orchestration layers, workflow engines, and tool invocation pipelines. u2022 Apply hands-on expertise with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Gemini, etc.) including prompt engineering, model adaptation, and inference optimization. u2022 Build and operationalize evaluation systems to measure agent accuracy, robustness, cost efficiency, latency, and reliability. u2022 Implement safety and trust mechanisms including content filters, alignment techniques, hallucination mitigation, monitoring pipelines, and auditability. u2022 Build data pipelines to support training and fine-tuning, synthetic data generation, feature stores, and real-time inference workflows. u2022 Use technology acumen to evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, execute research/proof-of-concepts, and establish scalable engineering patterns and best practices. Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs. About you: u2022 4 year degree or equivalent experience u2022 7+ years of software development experience with at least one full cycle implementation u2022 Demonstrates strong domain-specific knowledge regarding Targetu2019s technology capabilities, and key competitorsu2019 products and differentiating features u2022 Proficiency in Java and Python u2022 Experience with PostgreSQL, Open/Elasticsearch, Object Storage (S3/etc.) u2022 Hands-on experience with modern LLM ecosystems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Gemini, etc.) and productionizing GenAI capabilities u2022 Strong knowledge of emerging GenAI patterns, frameworks and use-cases, including: u2022 LangGraph / LangChain / Google GenAI, etc. u2022 Context Engineering / RAG / Agentic AI u2022 Experience designing scalable, reliable systems with strong performance, cost, and operational health awareness u2022 Strong stakeholder communication and ability to lead through influence across teams and partners u2022 Experience building highly scalable distributed systems u2022 Demonstrates broad and deep expertise in multiple computer languages and frameworks (e.g., open source). Designs, develops, and approves end-to-end functionality of a product line, platform, or infrastructure Nice to have: u2022 Experience with planning algorithms (ReAct, Tree-of-Thought, HTN), policy learning, reward modeling, and agent performance optimization strategies This position will operate as a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Targetu2019s needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team memberu2019s core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ location the role is assigned to (Brooklyn Park, MN or Sunnyvale, CA) and virtually, depending upon what your role, team and tasks require for that day. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Click here ( if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota. Benefits Eligibility Please paste this url into your preferred browser to learn about benefits eligibility for this role: Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) In compliance with state and federal laws, Target will make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please reach out to . Non-accommodation-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.