Lead Engineer - Merchandising Engineering

About Us:

Target Tech Overview: Every time a guest enters a Target store or browses Target.com , they experience the impact of Target s investments in technology and innovation. We re the technologists behind one of the most loved retail brands, delivering joy to millions of our guests, team members, and communities.

Our global in-house technology team of more than 5,000 of engineers, data scientists, architects, coaches and product managers strive to make Target the most convenient, safe and joyful place to shop. We use agile practices and leverage open-source software to adapt and build best-in-class technology for our team members and guests and we do so with a focus on diversity and inclusion, experimentation and continuous learning.

Pyramid Overview: Merchandising is a Portfolio within Target - Product Engineering provide reliable data that is core to our enterprise retail operations , including foundational data and aggregation services at scale for retail and commerce platforms. We deal with data around Pricing , Promotions , Item , Supplier , Owned Brand , Merch Planning, Space Presentation Transitions(SPT) Intelligence Automation..

About You:

As a lead engineer you would be responsible for

• Designing scalable architecture with the best choice of tech, responsible for all the services/functionalities that the team develops while ensuring quality of the teams code and/or infrastructure standards.
• Hands-on development, often taking on the more complicated tasks. Ensures solution is production ready, deployable, scalable and resilient.
• Planning and delivering of work in the team in addition to their own work. Promotes a learning culture through mentoring and coaching.
• Ensures product observability is in place for reliability. Fosters a culture of observability across teams and helps use operational data to improve stability and performance of their domains. Drives monitoring work on their team based on the organizations monitoring philosophy. Is aware of the operational data for their team s domain and uses it as a basis for driving changes to the teams services to achieve stability and performance improvements.
• Responsible for ensuring the security of the product and fostering a security first mindset across teams. Highly skilled with applying and implementing security concepts such as identifying vulnerabilities in software, creating logic to detect malicious behavior, and analyzing network or host artifacts.
• Able to articulate a technical strategy, value of technology, and impact to the business.
• Provides guidance and cultivates solutions for the most complex problems across teams.
• Encourages team to adopt a growth mindset. Educates team about how competitors and technology companies evolve their technologies.
• Guides the team in anticipation of future use cases and helps them make design decisions that minimise the cost of future changes. Evaluates options, defines pros and cons by working with the team, and identifies the best option.

Position Overview : To succeed in this role, you ll bring over 7+ years of experience in software design and development, with 5+ years focused on building scalable backend applications. You ll be a proven leader in guiding technical teams and driving products at scale to successful completion. Your expertise will lie in JVM-based technologies, specifically Java and Kotlin, along with a deep understanding of building robust, scalable systems.

Must Have Skills:

• Java / Kotlin (Advanced proficiency in Java/Kotlin development)
• Microservices Architecture (Designing, developing, and managing scalable microservices)
• Spring Boot or Micronaut (Experience with JVM-based frameworks, including reactive programming)
• Messaging Systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Databases (Experience with NoSQL databases like Cassandra, MongoDB, and SQL-based databases like PostgreSQL)
• CI/CD (Building and managing pipelines with Jenkins, GitLab, or similar tools)
• Unit and Integration Testing (Spock, JUnit, TestContainers, Selenium)
• Cloud Services (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Containerization and Orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Monitoring Observability (Grafana, ELK Stack, Prometheus)
• Event-Driven Architecture (Knowledge of event-driven patterns in distributed systems)

Good to Have Skills:

• Functional Programming (Familiarity with functional programming paradigms in Kotlin)
• GraphQL (Experience designing and integrating GraphQL APIs)
• Legacy System Modernization (Experience refactoring and modernizing older systems)
• Security Best Practices (OWASP, vulnerability scanning, secure coding principles)
• Agile Methodologies (Familiar with Scrum, Kanban, or other agile processes)