Lead Engineer GenAI

Pay is based on several factors which vary based on include labor markets and in some instancesmay include education work experience and 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 benefits for eligible team members include 401(k) employee discount short term disability long term disability paid sick leave paid national holidays and paid competitive benefits from financial and education to well-being and beyond at us:

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision tolife through our values and culture.Learn more about Target here.

Join Merchandising Engineering a globally distributed engineering team building the systems at the very heart of Target retail. We power Targets core merchandising capabilitiesItem Price Promo Merchandising Optimization Space Planning Vendor Experience and our growing Owned Brand portfolioatmassive scale. Our teams solve complex highimpact problems usingcuttingedgetechnologies including advanced AI and machine learning to deliver intelligent datadriven experiences to millions of guests and thousands of merchants. This is a team where engineers shape the future of retail technology influenceenterprisewidestrategy and grow their careers by working on platforms thatdirectly definehow Target curates prices plans and delivers the products our guests love.

As aLeadEngineer you serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team that supports a product. You createownandare responsible forthe application architecture that best serves the product in its functional and non-functional needs. Youidentifyand drive architectural changes to accelerate feature development or improve the quality of service (or both).You have deep and broad engineering skills andare capable of standingup an architecture in its whole on your own but you choose to influence a wider team by acting as a force multiplier.

About this Team:

Use your skillsexperienceand talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals. As a Lead Engineeryoulltake the lead as you

Design and implement autonomous AI agents capable of multi-step reasoning task planning tool usage memory/state management and iterative execution.

Lead development of multi-agent coordination frameworks agent orchestration layers workflow engines and tool invocation pipelines.

Apply hands-onexpertisewith LLMs (OpenAI Anthropic Llama Gemini etc.) including prompt engineering model adaptation and inference optimization.

Build andoperationalizeevaluation systems to measure agent accuracy robustness cost efficiency latency and reliability.

Implement safety and trust mechanisms including content filters alignment techniques hallucination mitigation monitoring pipelines and auditability.

Build data pipelines to support training and fine-tuning synthetic data generation feature stores and real-time inference workflows.

Use technology acumen to evaluate and adopt emerging technologies execute research/proof-of-concepts andestablishscalable engineering patterns and best practices.

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 yeardegree or equivalent experience
7 years of software development experience with at least one full cycle implementation
Demonstratesstrong domain-specific knowledgeregardingTargets technology capabilities and key competitors products and differentiating features

Proficiencyin Java and Python

Experience with PostgreSQL Open/Elasticsearch Object Storage (S3/etc.)

Hands-on experience with modern LLM ecosystems (OpenAI Anthropic Llama Gemini etc.) and productionizing GenAI capabilities

Strong knowledge of emerging GenAI patternsframeworksand use-cases including:

LangGraph/LangChain/ Google GenAI etc.

Context Engineering / RAG / Agentic AI

Experience designing scalable reliable systems withstrong performance cost and operational health awareness

Strong stakeholder communication and ability to lead through influence across teams and partners

Experience building highly scalable distributed systems

Demonstratesbroad and deepexpertisein multiple computer languages and frameworks (e.g. open source). Designs develops and approves end-to-end functionality of a product line platform or infrastructure

Nice to have:

Experience with planning algorithms (ReAct Tree-of-Thought HTN) policy learning reward modeling and agent performance optimization strategies

This position willoperateas a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Targets needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team members core rolewill need to beperformedboth onsite at the Target HQ locationthe role is assigned to(Brooklyn Park MN or Sunnyvale CA) and virtuallydepending 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.