Lead Engineer
Target
Lead Engineer
Target
Sells everyday goods and affordable designer styles
About us:
As a Fortune 50 company with more than 400,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers.
Joining Target means promoting a culture of mutual care and respect and striving to make the most meaningful and positive impact. Becoming a Target team member means joining a community that values different voices and lifts each other up. Here, we believe your unique perspective is important, and you'll build relationships by being authentic and respectful.
Overview about TII
At Target, we have a timeless purpose and a proven strategy. And that hasn’t happened by accident. Some of the best minds from different backgrounds come together at Target to redefine retail in an inclusive learning environment that values people and delivers world-class outcomes. That winning formula is especially apparent in Bengaluru, where Target in India operates as a fully integrated part of Target’s global team and has more than 4,000 team members supporting the company’s global strategy and operations.
Team Overview:
Roundel is Target’s entry into the media business with an impact of $1B+; an advertising sell-side business built on the principles of first-party, people-based data, brand-safe content environments and proof that our marketing programs drive business results for our clients.
We are here to drive business growth for our clients and redefine “value” in the industry by solving core industry challenges rather than simply replicating existing industry methods of operation. Roundel is a key growth initiative for Target and aims to lead the industry toward a better way of operating within the media marketplace.
Target Tech is on a mission to offer the systems,toolsand support that our clients, guests and team members need and deserve. We drive industry-leadingtechnologies in support of every angle of the business and help ensure that Targetoperatessmoothly,securelyand reliably from the inside out.
As part of this evolution,we are building intelligent platformsfor retail media space like ad decisioning, bidding, ad explanationsetc. that combine traditional software engineering with Large Language Models, retrieval systems, knowledgegraphsand agentic architectures to solve complex business and engineering problems at scale.
Role Overview:
As aLead Engineer (Ad Tech & Applied AI), you will provide technical leadership across backend platforms and emerging AI-powered capabilities.
You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to help define the technology strategy for Ad Tech platforms, including DSP, SSP and Ad Servers, supporting self-service advertising needs. You will assess build-versus-buy decisions for new capabilities through POCs and prototypes while considering long-term architecture, scalability,reliabilityand operational trade-offs.
A key part of this role will be designing and buildingproduction-grade applications powered by Large Language Models and agentic systemsfrom experimentation through production operation and continuous evaluation. We are looking for engineers who have moved beyond conversational AI prototypes and have experience engineering LLM-powered systems thatoperatereliably withinreal businessworkflows.
You will design architectures that combine deterministic software components with probabilistic AI capabilities, making deliberate decisions about where traditional code, rules and workflow engines should be used versus where LLM-driven reasoning and autonomous agents provide value.
You will lead engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements andassistteams in solving complex business challenges through scalable technical solutions.
You will work closely with engineering managers to build high-performing engineering teams and provide technical leadership, architecture guidance,coachingand mentoring. You will alsoparticipatein theselectionof technical talent and contribute actively to Target’s broader technical community.
About you:
You have8+ years of software development experience, with experience designing,buildingandoperatingcomplex distributed systems through at least one complete implementation lifecycle.
You have strong backend engineering fundamentals and are comfortable designing scalable APIs, microservices, asynchronous systems and data-intensive applications.
You are fluent inJava / Spring and microservices architecture, with experience buildinghighly availableproduction systems.
You have experience working with databases includingRDBMS and NoSQL technologies such as Cassandra andMongoDB, andunderstand datamodelingand storage trade-offs.
You have experience building distributed event-driven architectures using technologies such asKafka.
You understand Ad Tech business fundamentals and how technology supports businessobjectives, andcan translate business vision into technical strategy while understanding architectural and financial trade-offs.
Experience building or integratingDSP, SSP or Ad Server technology platformsin support of self-service advertising is preferred.
Applied AI & LLM Engineering
You have hands-on experiencedesigning,buildingandoperatingproduction applications using LLMs, beyond chat interfaces, promptexperimentationand proof-of-concept applications.
You have designed and optimized production-gradeRAG systems, with strong understanding ofdata ingestion and chunking, retrieval and ranking, context and grounding, hybrid retrieval, and evaluation.
You have experience withknowledge graphs and graph-based retrieval, and understand when to use vector search, Graph RAG, structured queries, traditionalsearchor hybrid approaches based on the problem and data.
You understand the engineering trade-offs of production LLM systems, includingquality, latency, cost, reliability, observability,securityand failure handling, and can systematically improve retrieval and overall system performance rather than relying primarily on prompt engineering.
Agentic Systems
You have designed or builtagentic applications or orchestration frameworkswhere LLM-powered components interact with tools, APIs, retrievalsystemsand other agents toaccomplishmulti-step tasks.
You understand concepts such as:
Tool/function calling
Agent planning and execution
Workflow and state management
Multi-agent orchestration
Agent memory and context management
Routing and delegation
Human-in-the-loop workflows
Guardrails and policy enforcement
Retry, timeout and fallback strategies
Agent observability and traceability
Evaluation of agentbehaviorand task completion
You understand the distinction betweendeterministic and non-deterministic execution pathsand can design systems that deliberately combine both.
You know when a business workflow should remain deterministic and testable using conventional software and when probabilistic reasoning using an LLM or agent isappropriate.
You design AI systems assuming that model outputs can be incorrect or unpredictable and therefore incorporateappropriatevalidation, constraints, structured outputs, fallbacks, idempotency, observability and human interventionwhererequired.
AI Quality & Evaluation
You understand that production AI systems require rigorousquality and evaluation practicesbeyond model selection and prompting.
You have experienceestablishingoffline and online evaluation strategiesfor LLM-powered systems, covering retrieval and response quality,factual grounding, task completion, reliability,latencyand cost.
You can buildevaluation harnesses and regression testswith representative datasets,metricsand quality thresholds, and integrate them intoCI/CD as deployment and quality gates.
You can use evaluation,observabilityand tracing to diagnose quality issues acrossdata, retrieval, context, prompts,modelsand orchestration, and drive systematic improvements.
Engineering Leadership
You can translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical architectures and incrementally deliver solutions from experimentation through production.
You make architecture decisions based on measurable trade-offs rather than technology trends and are comfortable challenging unnecessary complexity.
You can leadPOCs and technical experimentswhile clearly distinguishing between whatdemonstratesfeasibility and what isrequiredtooperatethe capability reliably at enterprise scale.
You have proven technical leadership capabilities and the ability to influence engineers, productleadersand cross-functional stakeholders.
You enjoy mentoring engineers and raising the technical capabilities of the broader engineering team.
You collaborate effectively with Product and domain experts and can communicate complex architecture decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
You stay current with evolving engineering and AI technologies through formal training and self-directed learning, while applyingnew technologiespragmatically.
You have experience working withinCI/CD and DevOps environmentsand understand production engineering practices including monitoring, observability, resilience,securityand operational readiness.
Useful Links:
Life at Target: https://india.target.com/
Benefits: https://india.target.com/life-at-target/workplace/benefits
Target sells groceries, clothing, home goods and other everyday products to U.S. shoppers through stores and its website, with an emphasis on affordable style and design. Its own brands include Cat & Jack children's clothing and Good & Gather food, alongside national brands and exclusive designer collections. Customers shop in person or order online for shipping, pickup or delivery, while Target Plus adds products from outside sellers. Merchandise sales drive its revenue, supplemented by Roundel advertising, marketplace fees and paid memberships. The company traces its roots to 1902, opened its first Target store in 1962, and is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
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