The pay range is $168,000.00 - $303,000.00
Pay 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.
Working 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.
As 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.
Technology 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.
Target 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.
Target’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.
Core 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.
Our first major capability is Action Center, along with the tools that help builders act on it:
Action 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.
We 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.
We 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.
As 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.
Principal 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.
You will be accountable for:
Success in this role requires exceptional technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity and consensus in ambiguous, high-scale environments.
This role is defined by three pillars. We expect a Principal Engineer to be outstanding across all three:
This 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.
You 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.
You will:
If you are motivated by scale, impact, and deep technical challenges, this role offers all three.
Within 6 to 12 months, you will have:
Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.
You 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.
Desired experience includes:
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 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. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Click here if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.
Please paste this url into your preferred browser to learn about benefits eligibility for this role: https://tgt.biz/BenefitsForYou_F
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-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.
Target is one of the world’s most recognized brands and one of America’s leading retailers. We make Target our guests’ preferred shopping destination by offering outstanding value, inspiration, innovation and an exceptional guest experience that no other retailer can deliver. Target is committed to responsible corporate citizenship, ethical business practices, environmental stewardship and generous community support. Since 1946, we have given 5 percent of our profits back to our communities. Our goal is to work as one team to fulfill our unique brand promise to our guests, wherever and whenever they choose to shop.
For more information, visit corporate.target.com.
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