{"id":3839887,"url":"https://alion.io/job/target-principal-engineer-core-platform-services","title":"Principal Engineer - Core Platform Services","company":{"id":3684,"name":"Target","domain":"target.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/target","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":92,"open_postings":392,"ghost_share":0.018,"stale_share":0.474,"repost_share":0.036,"time_to_fill_p50_days":9,"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Brooklyn Park, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":168000,"max":303000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":303000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-05T22:16:24Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-05","last_verified_at":"2026-11-07T06:05:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"The pay range is $168,000.00 - $303,000.00Pay 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.\nAbout Us\nWorking 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.\nAs a Principal Engineer you set the strategy for software development and/or infrastructure engineering at Target. You set the direction for how software and infrastructure engineering efforts will be designed, developed, and operationalized across multiple portfolios and drives adoption across tech. You lead and approve software and infrastructure engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements. You are a thought leader and mentor for internal and external technical talent and actively contribute to the external technical community.\nTechnology is one of Target’s top four enterprise priorities. It plays an outsized role in powering growth, speed, reliability, and innovation across the company. From merchandising and supply chain to stores and digital, our technology platforms directly enable the most critical outcomes for 2026 and beyond.\nTarget Tech builds and operates the intelligence powered architecture that fuels these outcomes. Our teams design scalable platforms, modern data ecosystems, and resilient infrastructure that allow thousands of engineers to deliver secure, high performing systems at enterprise scale.\nAbout the Core Platform Services Team\nTarget’s Infrastructure strategy is built around one idea: make the right thing the easy thing. The Target Application Platform (TAP) is where that happens. Builders tell TAP what they need, and the platform, more and more with help from AI agents, gets it done safely. In an agentic world, many more people create software. Builders at Target include engineers, product managers, UX designers, data scientists, and analysts.\nCore Platform Services builds the common services that connect Target’s platforms, so builders get a delightful experience that feels like one connected platform. We work closely with our Product Manager to find where builders lose the most time and decide what to build next.\nOur first major capability is Action Center, along with the tools that help builders act on it:\nAction Center. A shared service and API that platform teams use to publish the work they need from builders, such as instrumenting with OpenTelemetry or upgrading a runtime. It tracks that work across the more than 5,000 applications on TAP and gives each one a single prioritized list, in place of requests scattered across tickets, chat, and email.\nRemediation guides. A shared framework that lets a platform team write the fix for a common problem once and make it available to every application.\nAgentic remediation. AI agents that follow a guide, make the code change, and open a pull request for the builder to review, either in the background on TAP or inside the builder’s own coding agent. A person approves every change.\nAction Center is a starting point. Over time, the team will build the features and integrations that remove friction across the full builder experience, from starting a new project to running it in production. We track adoption, time to complete, and manual work removed, and use that data to decide what comes next.\nWe serve two groups: the builders who create software on TAP, and the platform teams who support them. We earn adoption by building services people want to use, and we measure success in builder time returned. The platform has already given back more than 500,000 hours, and this team’s work is a big part of growing that number.\nWe operate business-critical services in 24x7 production environments. Technologies commonly used across the team include Golang, Kubernetes, Kafka, React, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and agentic AI patterns.\nAbout the Role\nAs a Principal Engineer, you are the senior-most individual-contributor technical leader on the Core Platform Services team. You partner with the Senior Engineering Manager and the team’s Product Manager to set the technical vision, architecture, and standards for the team, and to remove friction across the full builder experience. This is a hands-on role: you lead through depth, design, and influence rather than through direct reports.\nPrincipal Engineers operate at the overall Infrastructure level. While you are assigned to Core Platform Services, you are expected to contribute meaningfully to broader Infrastructure priorities, including problems that lie outside your team.\nYou will be accountable for:\nTechnical direction. Owning the end-to-end architecture of Core Platform Services as it grows, from Action Center and agentic remediation today to the features and integrations that come next, along with the APIs and MCP servers that other platform teams and AI agents build on.\nThe hardest problems. Designing multi-tenant systems that many independent teams can extend without breaking each other, and AI agents that can safely change code for builders. That means least-privilege access, a clear record of every change, and human review.\nPlatform as a product. Partnering with the Product Manager to treat builder experience as an internal product, with self-service by default, adoption you can measure, and services that work for builders with or without a deep engineering background.\nEngineering standards. Setting technical standards and leading design and architecture reviews across the team and partner platform teams.\nInfrastructure impact. Contributing to Infrastructure-wide technical priorities beyond Core Platform Services.\nEnterprise influence. Building relationships with Principal Engineers across Target to learn where builders hit the most friction and where the biggest opportunities are, and working with the Product Manager to turn what you learn into the roadmap. You also represent Core Platform Services in enterprise architecture forums.\nSuccess in this role requires exceptional technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity and consensus in ambiguous, high-scale environments.\nWhat We’re Looking For\nThis role is defined by three pillars. We expect a Principal Engineer to be outstanding across all three:\nTechnical Depth. Deep, current expertise in distributed systems and multi-tenant platform design, including APIs and extension models, durable workflow orchestration, event-driven systems, and identity and authorization. Hands-on experience with LLM and agentic systems, including tool use and MCP, evaluation, and guardrails. You can go deep enough to debug the system and broad enough to shape the platform.\nTechnical Leadership. Proven ability to influence across an organization without direct authority. You set standards, build architectural consensus across teams that do not report to you, and mentor senior engineers. You make the engineers around you better and bring clarity to ambiguous, contested problems.\nPlatform / Product. A product mindset toward internal platforms. You judge success by adoption and builder experience, and you design for self-service so builders can get what they need without filing a request.\nWhy This Role Is Compelling\nThis role sits at the center of one of Target’s top enterprise priorities. Every hour of manual work this team removes is an hour returned to builders across Target.\nYou are joining at a turning point. Target is moving from a sequential software development lifecycle, where work passes from one stage and one team to the next, to an AI-driven development lifecycle (AI-DLC), where builders and AI agents plan, build, test, and fix in continuous loops. As Principal Engineer, you will define how AI agents safely change code across more than 5,000 applications.\nYou will:\nShape how thousands of builders across Target create software, from engineers to product managers, designers, and data scientists\nFind and remove the biggest sources of friction in how Target builds software\nLead the shift from \"file a ticket and wait\" to AI agents that resolve platform work directly\nBuild the shared foundations every other platform team depends on\nIf you are motivated by scale, impact, and deep technical challenges, this role offers all three.\nWhat Success Looks Like\nWithin 6 to 12 months, you will have:\nRatified a clear architecture and technical roadmap for Core Platform Services, shaped with Principal Engineers across Target and the Product Manager, and adopted by the platform teams that build on it\nEstablished the remediation guide framework as the way multiple platform domains deliver fixes to builders\nDelivered agentic remediation in production that builders and leadership trust\nMeasurably reduced builder time to completion and eliminated duplicated tooling across platform teams\nStrengthened the senior engineering bench through design leadership, mentorship, and durable technical standards\nMade a visible, meaningful contribution to at least one Infrastructure-wide priority beyond Core Platform Services\nCore responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.\nAbout You\nYou are a technical leader who leads through depth and influence. You are energized by platform architecture, distributed systems, and applied AI, and equally by helping other engineers grow in scope and impact.\nDesired experience includes:\n4 yeardegree or equivalent experience. Continuing education to maintain thorough knowledge of technical domains along with staying current in latest technologies\n12+ years of experience in technology development or services\n4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction\nArchitecting and operating internal platforms, developer tooling, or shared services used by other teams\nDesigning multi-tenant systems with extension points that other teams build against\nBuilding and securing production LLM or agentic systems, including evaluation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop design\nSupporting and operating 24x7 business-critical capabilities\nDesigning and deploying scalable APIs, microservices, and event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka)\nDepth in one or more platform languages such as Golang, and orchestration with Kubernetes\nCommunicating complex technical solutions clearly to technical and non-technical audiences\nWorking effectively across multiple teams in a product-oriented environment\nMinimum Qualifications\nIn-depth knowledge of system design, build, test, and operational debugging practices\nDemonstrated experience architecting and delivering production distributed systems at scale\nA track record of sustained technical influence and standard-setting across multiple engineering teams\nCommitment to continuous learning and staying current with evolving technologies\nThis position will operate as 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 role will need to be performed both 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. 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