Senior AI Engineer - Circlecard
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Senior AI Engineer (Backend Platform) -CircleCardAccount Services (CAS)
About Us
Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and inclusive culture.
As aSenior AI Engineer,you'llcombine deep software engineeringexpertisewith modern AI application development to build intelligent, scalable, andhighly reliablesystems.You'llserve as a technical leader, shaping application architecture, influencing implementation decisions, andestablishingengineering best practices.
You are equally comfortable designing distributed services and applying Generative AI technologies to solve complex engineering and business problems. Youleveragestrong software engineering fundamentals to build production-grade AI capabilities that are secure, observable, scalable, and cost-efficient.
About the Team:CircleCardAccount Services (CAS)
TheCircleCardAccount Services (CAS) team builds andoperatesthe enterprise API platform powering Target'sCircleCardecosystem. Our platform serves as the central gateway forCircleCardaccount management, new account booking, payments, servicing, compliance processing, and partner integrations.
CAS owns a mission-critical platform that enables secure, high-volume financial and non-financial operations across Target. Our services powernearly everyaspect of theCircleCardaccount lifecycle and integrate withnumerousenterprise systems.
Current initiatives include:
Building AI-ready platform capabilities and MCP-based tools and services.
Expanding shared platform capabilities, including distributed caching and reusable platform services.
Improving API performance, scalability, resiliency, and observability to support significant traffic growth.
Building AI-powered engineering productivity capabilities.
Automating engineering and operational workflows through intelligent AI agents.
As AI becomes a foundational capability across Target, CAS is investing in intelligent engineering platforms and AI-powered solutions that improve developer productivity, automate operational workflows, and enhance platform reliability.
What You'll Do
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 whilemaintaininghigh standardsfor code quality, security, architecture, and maintainability.
Apply sound engineering judgment tovalidateAI-generated code and technical recommendations through testing, peer reviews, and established software engineering practices.
Design and buildproductionAI-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) solutionsleveragingenterprise knowledge sources, vector search technologies, and semantic retrieval.
OptimizeAI applications for response quality, latency, throughput, tokenutilization, 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, andmaintainhighly scalable AI-ready services usingKotlin, Java, and Micronaut.
Build secure, high-performance RESTful APIs and event-driven services supporting high-volume retail and financial workloads.
Design distributed systems usingKafka, asynchronous messaging, distributed caching, and cloud-native architecture patterns.
Design andoptimizePostgreSQL databases, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization, and transactional integrity.
Build resilient,highly availableservices with strong fault tolerance, scalability, and operational excellence.
Lead technical design discussions, architecture reviews, code reviews, and implementation planning.
Improve platform observability usingOpenTelemetry, 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
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of software engineering experience building enterprise-scale distributed applications and services.
AI Engineering
Hands-on experience designing and deployingproductionAI 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.
ExperienceoptimizingAI applications for quality, latency, token efficiency, and inference cost while implementing responsible AI, governance, and observability practices.
ProficiencyinPython for AI application development, automation, or AI tooling.
Services Engineering
Expert-levelproficiencyinKotlin andJava, with experience building microservices usingMicronaut and/orSpring Boot.
Strong experience designing distributed systems, RESTful APIs, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
Experience buildinghighly 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.
Why Join Us
CircleCardAccount Services sits at the heart of one of Target's most critical financial platforms. Every day, millions of guests and internal systems rely on the services we build.
As a Senior AI Engineer,you'llhelp shape the future of enterprise software engineering by combining modern AI capabilities with large-scale distributed systems.You'llbuild intelligent services, reusable engineering platforms, and production-grade agentic AI capabilities that improve developer productivity, strengthen operational excellence, and deliver exceptional experiences for Target's guests and team members.
This 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 rolewill need to beperformedboth onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned toandvirtually,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. Clickhere if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.
Benefits Eligibility
Please paste this url into your preferred browser to learn about benefits eligibility for this role: https://tgt.biz/BenefitsForYou_DAmericans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
In compliance with state and federal laws, Target will make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please reach out to candidate.accommodations@HRHelp.Target.com.Non-accommodation-relatedrequests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.