Senior AI Engineer

AI Engineering:

• Leverage AI-assisted software development tools throughout the software development lifecycle, including solution design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and code reviews.  

• Collaborate effectively with AI coding assistants and enterprise AI platforms to improve engineering productivity while maintaininghigh standards for code quality, security, architecture, and maintainability.  

• Apply sound engineering judgment to validate AI-generated code and technical recommendations through testing, peer reviews, and established software engineering practices.  

• Design and build production AI-powered applications using Target-approved AI platforms, frameworks, and Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve engineering and business problems.  

• Design, build, and deploy production-grade autonomous and agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool orchestration, memory management, and multi-step workflow execution.  

• Develop domain-specific AI agents and multi-agent workflows using modern orchestration frameworks to automate engineering processes and enhance retail and enterprise experiences.  

• Design and implement prompt engineering and Context Engineering strategies to improve application quality, reliability, and relevance.  

• Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions leveraging enterprise knowledge sources, vector search technologies, and semantic retrieval.  

• Optimize AI applications for response quality, latency, throughput, token utilization, and inference cost.  

• Implement AI evaluation frameworks and apply responsible AI, security, privacy, governance, and observability best practices.  

• Build reusable AI components, frameworks, libraries, workflows, and engineering accelerators that improve developer productivity.  

• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities, lead proof-of-concept initiatives, and recommend adoption strategies that deliver measurable business value.  

• Partner across engineering teams to integrate AI capabilities into products, platforms, and software development workflows.  

Services Engineering:

• Design, develop, and maintain highly scalableAI-ready services using Kotlin, Java, and Micronaut.  

• Build secure, high-performanceRESTful APIs and event-driven servicessupporting high-volume retail and financial workloads.  

• Design distributed systems using Kafka, asynchronous messaging, distributed caching, and cloud-native architecture patterns.  

• Design and optimizePostgreSQL databases, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization, and transactional integrity.  

• Build resilient, highly available services with strong fault tolerance, scalability, and operational excellence.  

• Lead technical design discussions, architecture reviews, code reviews, and implementation planning.  

• Improve platform observability using OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging, and production monitoring.  

• Continuously improve application performance, scalability, resiliency, observability, and operational health.  

• Partner closely with Product Management, UX, Architecture, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to deliver customer-focused solutions.  

About You

RequiredQualifications:

• 4 years ofdegree or equivalent practical experience.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building enterprise-scale applications and backend systems.

AIEngineering:

• Hands-on experience designing and deploying production AI applications, AI-powered tools, or agentic systems using modern Large Language Models (LLMs).  

• Experience building autonomous or multi-agent workflows using technologies such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, Google ADK, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent orchestration frameworks.  

• Strong understanding of AI application architecture, including Prompt Engineering, Context Engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), tool calling, memory management, orchestration patterns, and AI evaluation.  

• Experience optimizing AI applications for quality, latency, token efficiency, and inference cost while implementing responsible AI, governance, and observability practices.  

• Proficiency in Python for AI application development, automation, or AI tooling.  

ServicesEngineering:

• Expert-level proficiency in Kotlin and Java, with experience building microservices using Micronaut and/or Spring Boot.  

• Strong experience designing distributed systems, RESTful APIs, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD pipelines.  

• Experience building highly available, resilient, secure, and observable production services.  

Leadership &Collaboration:

• Strong communication, collaboration, and technical leadership skills with experience mentoring engineers, leading design discussions, and driving engineering best practices.  

• Passion for applying emerging AI technologies to solve complex engineering and business challenges. 

Extra points if you have:

• Worked onwith workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal

• Experience creating reusable AI workflows or “skills” to enable efficient, repeatable engineering tasks

• Worked onTargetRegister platform

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.