Lead Engineer - Search Team

About us:

As a Fortune 50 company with more than 350,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers.​

Working at Target means the opportunity to help all families discover the joy of everyday life. Caring for our communities is woven into who we are, and we invest in the places we collectively live, work and play. We prioritize relationships, fuel and develop talent by creating growth opportunities, and succeed as one Target team. At our core, our purpose is ingrained in who we are, what we value, and how we work. It’s how we care, grow, and win together

Target as a tech company? Absolutely. We’re the behind-the-scenes powerhouse that fuels Target’s passion and commitment to cutting-edge innovation. We anchor every facet of one of the world’s best-loved retailers with a strong technology framework that relies on the latest tools and technologies—and the brightest people—to deliver incredible value to guests online and in stores. Target Technology Services is on a mission to offer the systems, tools and support that guests and team members need and deserve. Our high-performing teams balance independence with collaboration, and we pride ourselves on being versatile, agile and creative. We drive industry-leading technologies in support of every angle of the business, and help ensure that Target operates smoothly, securely and reliably from the inside out.

As a lead engineer, you serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team that supports a product. You create, own and are responsible for the application architecture that best serves the product in its functional and non-functional needs.  You identify and drive architectural changes to accelerate feature development or improve the quality of service (or both).  You have deep and broad engineering skills and are capable of standing up an architecture in its whole on your own, but you choose to influence a wider team by acting as a “force multiplier”.   Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description.  Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Use your skills, experience and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals.  As a Lead Engineer, you’ll take the lead as you…
Use your technology acumen to apply and maintain knowledge of current and emerging technologies within specialized area(s) of the technology domain. Evaluate new technologies and participates in decision-making, accounting for several factors such as viability within Target’s technical environment, maintainability, and cost of ownership. Initiate and execute research and proof-of-concept activities for new technologies. Lead or set strategy for testing and debugging at the platform or enterprise level. In complex and unstructured situations, serve as an expert resource to create and improve standards and best practices to ensure high-performance, scalable, repeatable, and secure deliverables. Lead the design, lifecycle management, and total cost of ownership of services. Provide the team with thought leadership to promote re-use and develop consistent, scalable patterns. Participate in planning services that have enterprise impact. Provide suggestions for handling routine and moderately complex technical problems, escalating issues when appropriate. Gather information, data, and input from a wide variety of sources; identify additional resources when appropriate, engage with appropriate stakeholders, and conduct in-depth analysis of information. Provide suggestions for handling routine and moderately complex technical problems, escalating issues when appropriate. Develop plans and schedules, estimate resource requirements, and define milestones and deliverables. Monitor workflow and risks; play a leadership role in mitigating risks and removing obstacles. Lead and participate in complex construction, automation, and implementation activities, ensuring successful implementation with architectural and operational requirements met. Establish new standards and best practices to monitor, test, automate, and maintain IT components or systems. Serve as an expert resource in disaster recovery and disaster recovery planning. Stay current with Target’s technical capabilities, infrastructure, and technical environment. Develop fully attributed data models, including logical, physical, and canonical. Influence data standards, policies, and procedures. Install, configure, and/or tune data management solutions with minimal guidance. Monitor data management solution(s) and identify optimization opportunities.

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 • 7+ years of software development experience with at least one full cycle implementation • Demonstrates broad and deep expertise in multiple computer languages and frameworks, with core expertise in JVM-based languages (Kotlin, Java) and distributed streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka Streams) at scale. Designs, develops, and approves end-to-end functionality of a product line, platform, or infrastructure, serving as technical anchor for high-traffic search platform systems • Ensures data consistency and correctness across distributed, event-driven pipelines, with strategies for incremental processing and minimal-downtime system updates • Designs and optimizes distributed serving architectures that aggregate results across multiple systems within strict latency constraints, with resilience to partial system degradation • Hands-on experience managing or resolving P0 (Priority-0) production incidents in large-scale systems • Communicates and coordinates effectively with project teams, partners, and stakeholders, while maintaining deep technical expertise and staying current with evolving technologies Nice to Have • Strong foundation in information retrieval and search engine internals, including modern retrieval techniques such as hybrid lexical and semantic (vector-based) search (big plus) • Experience with Redis and search databases such as Solr or Elasticsearch (big plus)