Full-Time

Lead Engineer

Ad Tech

Target

Target

10,001+ employees

Multi-channel retailer selling apparel, home, groceries

No salary listed

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

In Person

Category
Software Engineering (1)
Required Skills
LLM
Distributed Systems
Software Testing
Apache Kafka
Java
RDBMS
RAG
Microservices
Observability
MongoDB
REST APIs
Data Modeling
DevOps
Spring
Cassandra

Get referred to Target

See people who can refer or advise you

Requirements
  • At least 8 years of software development experience, including designing, building, and operating complex distributed systems through at least one complete implementation lifecycle.
  • Strong backend engineering fundamentals, including scalable application programming interfaces, microservices, asynchronous systems, and data-intensive applications.
  • Fluency in Java, Spring, and microservices architecture, with experience building highly available production systems.
  • Experience with relational database management systems and NoSQL technologies such as Cassandra and MongoDB, including data modeling and storage trade-offs.
  • Experience building distributed event-driven architectures using technologies such as Kafka.
  • Understanding of advertising technology business fundamentals and how technology supports business objectives.
  • Ability to translate business vision into technical strategy while understanding architectural and financial trade-offs.
  • Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating production applications using large language models beyond chat interfaces, prompt experimentation, and proof-of-concept applications.
  • Experience designing and optimizing production-grade retrieval-augmented generation systems, including data ingestion and chunking, retrieval and ranking, context and grounding, hybrid retrieval, and evaluation.
  • Experience with knowledge graphs and graph-based retrieval, including choosing among vector search, Graph RAG, structured queries, traditional search, and hybrid approaches.
  • Understanding of production large language model engineering trade-offs, including quality, latency, cost, reliability, observability, security, and failure handling.
  • Experience designing or building agentic applications or orchestration frameworks in which large-language-model components interact with tools, application programming interfaces, retrieval systems, and other agents to accomplish multi-step tasks.
  • Understanding of tool or 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, and evaluation of agent behavior and task completion.
  • Ability to distinguish deterministic and non-deterministic execution paths and deliberately combine both in system designs.
  • Ability to incorporate validation, constraints, structured outputs, fallbacks, idempotency, observability, and human intervention into AI systems.
  • Experience establishing offline and online evaluation strategies for large-language-model systems, covering retrieval and response quality, factual grounding, task completion, reliability, latency, and cost.
  • Ability to build evaluation harnesses and regression tests with representative datasets, metrics, and quality thresholds, and integrate them into continuous integration and continuous delivery as deployment and quality gates.
  • Ability to use evaluation, observability, and tracing to diagnose quality issues across data, retrieval, context, prompts, models, and orchestration.
  • Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical architectures and incrementally deliver solutions from experimentation through production.
  • Ability to make architecture decisions based on measurable trade-offs and challenge unnecessary complexity.
  • Ability to lead proof-of-concepts and technical experiments while distinguishing feasibility demonstrations from capabilities required to operate reliably at enterprise scale.
  • Proven technical leadership and ability to influence engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Experience working within continuous integration, continuous delivery, and DevOps environments, including monitoring, observability, resilience, security, and operational readiness.
Responsibilities
  • Provide technical leadership across backend platforms and emerging artificial-intelligence-powered capabilities.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define technology strategy for advertising technology platforms, including demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and ad servers supporting self-service advertising.
  • Assess build-versus-buy decisions for new capabilities through proof-of-concepts and prototypes while considering long-term architecture, scalability, reliability, and operational trade-offs.
  • Design and build production-grade applications powered by large language models and agentic systems from experimentation through production operation and continuous evaluation.
  • Design architectures that combine deterministic software components with probabilistic artificial-intelligence capabilities, selecting traditional code, rules, and workflow engines versus large-language-model-driven reasoning and autonomous agents.
  • Lead engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements and assist teams in solving complex business challenges through scalable technical solutions.
  • Work closely with engineering managers to build high-performing engineering teams and provide technical leadership, architecture guidance, coaching, and mentoring.
  • Participate in the selection of technical talent and contribute to Target’s broader technical community.
  • Systematically improve retrieval and overall system performance rather than relying primarily on prompt engineering.
  • Design systems that combine conventional deterministic software and probabilistic reasoning appropriately for business workflows.
  • Incorporate appropriate validation, constraints, structured outputs, fallbacks, idempotency, observability, and human intervention where required.
  • Build evaluation harnesses and regression tests and integrate them into continuous integration and continuous delivery deployment and quality gates.
  • Use evaluation, observability, and tracing to drive systematic improvements.
  • Translate business vision into technical strategy and communicate complex architecture decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Mentor engineers and raise the technical capabilities of the broader engineering team.
  • Apply new engineering and AI technologies pragmatically through formal training and self-directed learning.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience building or integrating demand-side platform, supply-side platform, or ad server technology platforms in support of self-service advertising.

Target is a large retailer that sells clothing, electronics, home goods, and groceries through about 2,000 stores and an online platform, and it also carries its own branded products. It works by stocking broad assortments and offering convenient shopping options, including same-day services, supported by owned brands and a strong online presence; customers can shop in stores or online and use the Target Circle loyalty program with flexible memberships. Its differentiators include the Design For All philosophy—high-quality, well-designed products at affordable prices—a wide lineup of owned brands, and a focus on rewards and convenience through its loyalty program and services, plus a commitment to sustainability via Target Forward. Target’s goal is to provide a convenient, relevant, and enjoyable shopping experience while pursuing a sustainable, community-minded business that gives back to neighborhoods.

Company Size

10,001+

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Founded

2005

Get referred to Target

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Q2 2026 comparable sales rose 3.8%, and Target raised full-year guidance.
  • Target opened its 2,000th store and plans over 30 openings in 2026.
  • Next-day delivery now reaches over 50 metros, expanding free speedy fulfillment options.

What critics are saying

  • Fiddelke cut 1,800 corporate roles in October 2025 after prolonged sales declines.
  • DEI backlash, boycotts, and litigation damaged Target’s brand trust through 2026.
  • Tariffs and import exposure pressure pricing; a failed turnaround threatens Target’s relevance.

What makes Target unique

  • Target combines 2,000 stores with same-day, next-day, and Drive Up fulfillment.
  • Target Circle 360, Roundel, and Target Plus deepen recurring digital monetization.
  • Target’s owned-brand design still differentiates it from Walmart and Costco.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

Paid Sick Leave

Paid Holidays

Paid Vacation

401(k) Retirement Plan

Employee Discounts

Growth & Insights

Headcount

6 month growth

-4%

1 year growth

-4%

2 year growth

-4%