Director of Engineering

About Us:

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and culture.Learn more about Target here.Target is one of the world’s most recognized brands and one of America’s leading retailers. But behind the brand our guestslove,is a culture of continual innovation and right now, we are up tobig things! Target’s security team is a place where innovation happens daily. Interested in a culture that combines ongoing learning, engineering excellence, and stellar outcomes? We are too –that’swhy we work here. Join our team to improve Target’s security and move the business forward.

As an Engineering Director on the Cloud Security team,you'lllead a team of engineers responsible for deploying,operating, automating, and scaling cloud security capabilities across Target's public and private cloud environments. Your team is responsible for turning requirements into running, scaled, and continuously improving controls – including CSPM,IaCscanning, Kubernetes admission control, SSPM, secure configurationmanagement, cloud workload protection, and the integration of cloud security findings into Target's enterprise remediation and governance processes.

Beyond deep technicalexpertise, you have a strong bias for action and a builder's mindset. Cloud Security sitsbetween architectureand the engineering teams who consume it, and you are comfortable operating in thatrealm– translating security requirements into reliable, automated, developer-friendly controls; owning the day-to-day operation and continuous improvement of the platforms that enforce them; coordinating exceptions and developer-experience tradeoffs with BISO, Security Architecture, and product engineering; and partnering with Detection & Response, Vulnerability Management, and the broader Cloud Platform organization so that cloud security findings flow into the enterprise remediation lifecycle. You have the engineering credibility to lead engineers who build andoperatethis platform, and the communication and partnership skills to make the controls land well across Target.

Expect to:

•Lead, build, and develop a team of cloud securityplatform, automation, and governance engineers responsible for the day-to-day implementation and operation of Target's cloud security controls.

•Establishgood stakeholder communication, work closely with partner teams, and help drive requirements while being a strong advocate of efficient and secure engineering practices.

•Build and manage a team of high performing engineers and provide leadership, coaching, motivation and recommend staffing levels, operating procedures, tools, and systems for the team.

•Provide career development and performance management to a team of engineers.

•Set the engineering culture and bar for the team — code quality, testing, code review, on-call hygiene, postmortems, and operational excellence.

•Own the end-to-end engineering, deployment, configuration, and ongoing operation of Target's cloud security platforms — including CSPM,IaCscanning, Kubernetes admission control, SSPM, secure config management, and cloud workload protection — across Target's public and private cloud environments.

•Operatethese platforms as production systems: owntheir availability, performance, observability, capacity, upgrade cadence, and outage response, with clear SLOs and on-call coverage.

•Own the implementation ofIaCscanning policies in CI/CD pipelines, turning architectural requirements (e.g., Rego policy) into reliable, developer-friendly guardrails that fail fast and explain why.

•Implement andoperateKubernetes admission controller policies across the private and public cloudfleet, andown the rollout strategy that gets to enforcement without breaking developers.

•Build andoperatethe capabilities that support cloud incident response in partnership with Detection & Response.

•Translate policy requirements into a prioritized engineeringroadmap, anddeliver against it predictably.

•Drive multi-quarter initiatives end-to-end: from problem framing and scoping, through design, build, rollout, adoption, and steady-state operation.

•Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions and own the lifecycle of the cloud security tools the teamoperates: vendor relationship, evaluations/POCs, contract input, capability adoption, and sunsetting.

•Drive adoption of the team's controls across Target Tech, including onboarding, exception/governance workflows, and developer enablement.

•Treat the cloud security control plane as a product: invest in automation, self-service, and platform thinking so controls scale with Target's cloud footprint.

•Continuously reduce toil for both your team and Target's engineering organization — fewer one-off tickets, more paved roads, better defaults, faster feedback in CI/CD.

•Own the developer experience of the team's controls: clear error messages, documented escape hatches, fast and well-coordinated exception handling, and a tight feedback loop with product engineering.

•Own the findings pipeline: aggregate signal from config hardening, CSPM,IaCand admission controller exceptions, and SSPM, and ship it into Target's enterprise remediation dashboardswith SLAsso product and platform teams can act.

•Partner with the broader Cloud Platform organization, Identity Security, Network Security, Data Security, Detection & Response, Vulnerability Management, BISO, and product engineering toalign onrequirements, rollout plans, and operational ownership.

•Represent the team's work clearly to senior leadership: roadmap, risk reduction, operational health, and tradeoffs — in language tuned to the audience.

Core responsibilities are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

About You:

•4-year degree OR equivalent work experience

•10+ years of hands-on experience in technology, with deep experience in cloud security and the adjacent disciplines that make it work — cloud platform engineering, Kubernetes,IaC/CI-CD, automation, identity, and detection/response integration

•4+ years managing engineering teams with a strongtrack recordof delivery in a platform, infrastructure, software development, or security engineering context

•Experience hiring, growing, andretainingsenior engineering talent, and building team operating models from the ground up

•You lead engineers, not just programs:you'veowned the full stack of engineering management — hiring, performance, career growth, on-call culture, code review standards, postmortems, and operational excellence

•Demonstratedtrack recordof running production platforms with clear SLOs, on-call coverage, change management, and continuous-improvement loops

•Experience driving multi-quarter roadmaps end-to-end — from problem framing through rollout, adoption, and steady-state operation — and delivering predictably against them

•Comfortable making and defending pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions, owning vendor relationships and tool lifecycles, and knowing when to invest in custom engineering vs. lean on a platform

•Demonstratedexperience leading teams thatoperatecloud security platforms at scale — CSPM,IaCscanning, SSPM, Security Configuration Management, and cloud workload protection

•Hands-on experience with public cloud (GCPpreferred; AWS/Azure experience also valued) and private cloud / Kubernetes environments at enterprise scale

•Expertisein Kubernetes and admission controller frameworks, including the rollout patterns required to move from detect to enforce without breaking developers

•Strong working knowledge of infrastructure as code (Terraform and equivalent) and policy-as-code (e.g., Rego), and experience integrating policy enforcement into CI/CD

•Experience building and operating findings pipelines that integrate cloud security signal into enterprise remediation/governance platforms (e.g., shipping CSPM,IaC, admission controller, and SSPM findings to acentralized dashboardswith ownership attribution & SLAs)

•Experience integrating cloud telemetry into enterprise SIEM/SOAR pipelines

•Proven history of effectivelyutilizinga variety of security tools and technologies across diverse environments. The ideal candidate will not be limited to specific vendors or solutions but willpossessthe technical depth tocomprehendand implement end-to-end solutions that align withthe reference security architecture's requirements

•Hands-on experience integrating security tooling with developer workflows (CI/CD, source control, ticketing, IDP/internal developer platforms) in a way that scales with a large engineering organization

•Strong understanding of secure software development practices, network security fundamentals, and modern cloud-native architectures

•Solid understanding of AI/ML and the emerging security considerations associated with it, including how to enforce them through cloud security tooling

•Automation-first engineering mindset, with hands-on fluency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g., Python, Go) anda track recordof building reusable platforms and paved roads instead of one-off scripts

•Strong cross-functional partner: comfortable working closely with security architecture, cloud platform, identity, network, data security, detection & response, vulnerability management, BISO, and product engineering teams to align requirements, rollout plans, and operational ownership

•Effective atrepresentingyour team's work, risks, and tradeoffs to senior leadership, and equally effective explaining the same content to staff engineers in detail

•Good understanding of security management workflows in large enterprise organizations and complex environments, and of the current threat landscape and the challenges most organizations are facing

•Working knowledge of security frameworks, standards, and best practices (e.g., NIST, CIS Benchmarks, ISO/IEC 27001) — enough to align the team's controls to them, without being the policy author

•Excellent written and verbal communication skills with strong presentation abilities

•Demonstratedcuriosity, bias for action, and a genuine builder's mindset — you want to ship the platform, not just describe it

This position willoperateas a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Target’s needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team member’s core rolewill need to beperformedboth onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned to 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. Clickhereif you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.