Lead Engineer AI Security

The pay range is $132,000.00 - $238,000.00

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 https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.

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 guests love, is a culture of continual innovation and right now, we are up to big 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’s why we work here. Join our team to improve Target’s security and move the business forward.

As a Lead Engineer on the Security Architecture team, you’ll collaborate with technical and leadership teams across Target Tech to ensure that systems are designed and built securely. You will identify relevant security risks, develop appropriate mitigation strategies, integrate security functions and controls into the overall system architecture, evaluate and provide feedback on proposed architectures, and design secure architecture. This role is highly technical, and you bring a deep understanding of security risks, controls, mitigations, and standards to a collaborative and advisory role, helping the rest of the enterprise as new platforms and systems are built, and as existing ones are modified over time.

Beyond the deep expertise, you have great interpersonal skills: our Security Architects are called upon to collaborate across the enterprise and have exceptional communication skills that enable open and cooperative partnerships.

Expect to:

• Collaborate with system designers to integrate security requirements into the design phase of IT systems

• Develop and maintain security architecture documentation, including security models, frameworks, and diagrams

• Ensure that security architecture aligns with the organization’s business objectives and regulatory requirements

• Understand security risks in order to identify potential vulnerabilities and threats

• Develop risk mitigation strategies and recommend appropriate security controls

• Design and implement security solutions, including firewalls, encryption protocols, and access control mechanisms

• Collaborate with development and operations teams to ensure secure creation and deployment of IT systems

• Provide guidance on secure coding practices

• Prioritize driving highly impactful changes that improve the business

• Conduct full-stack architecture reviews of products and platforms

• Provide expertise on information security for complex systems and applications in cloud and on-prem environments

• Design security reference architectures and create implementation/configuration guides  

• Provide expertise on creation and implementation of security controls with an emphasis on cloud technologies

• Efficiently assess and communicate risk accurately while negotiating priorities with cross-domain stakeholders

• Collaborate with engineering teams to perform advanced security analysis on complex cloud systems, identifying gaps while contributing to design solutions and security requirements

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

About You:

• 4-year degree OR equivalent experience

• Polyglot programmer comfortable in many languages across different platforms

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in technology, with extensive knowledge of cybersecurity domains including Information Protection, AI Security and/or Cloud Security (GCP strongly preferred)

• Demonstrated curiosity and ability to learn

• Expertise in containerization technologies and tools

• Solid understanding of genAI/ML

• Understanding of prompt injection and its various styles (direct, indirect, RAG poisoning, etc.) / Familiarity with OWSAP top ten for LLMs

• Understanding of MCP auth patterns including dynamic client registration

• Knowledge in RAG authorization patterns

• Experience mitigating the security risks of local coding agents.

• Seeks out cross-team collaboration opportunities

• Stays current on relevant technologies with self-directed learning

• Excellent written and verbal interpersonal skills with strong presentation abilities

• Proven history of effectively utilizing a variety of security tools and technologies across diverse environments. The ideal candidate will not be limited to specific vendors or solutions but will possess the technical depth to comprehend and implement an end-to-end solution that aligns with our reference security architecture's requirements

• Good understanding of security management workflows in large enterprise organizations and complex environments

• Has a good understanding of the current threat landscape and the challenges that most organizations are facing

• Knowledge of security frameworks, standards, and best practices (e.g., NIST, ISO/IEC 27001)

• Strong understanding of network security, cryptography, and secure software development

• Experience with security technologies, such as firewalls, IDS/IPS, SIEM, and DLP

• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills

Preferred:

• GCP native security product experience (VPC Service Controls, Organization constraints, Cloud Armor, NextGen Firewall etc.)

• Experience with Google SCC or Wiz is a plus

• Vertex AI experience

• AWS or Azure experience

This position may be considered for a Remote or Hybrid (known internally at Target as "Flex for Your Day") work arrangement based on Target's needs.  A Remote work arrangement means the team member works full-time from home or an alternate location that's not a Target location, does not have a desk at a Target location and may travel to HQ up to 4 times a year.  A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team member's core role may be performed either remote or onsite at a Target location 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.

Benefits Eligibility

Please paste this url into your preferred browser to learn about benefits eligibility for this role: https://tgt.biz/BenefitsForYou_E

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 [email protected].Non-accommodation-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.  

Application deadline is : 10/08/2026