About Us:

As a Fortune 50 company with more than4000,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers.

Working at Target means the opportunity to help all families discover the joy of everyday life. Caring for our communities is woven into who we are, and we invest in the places we collectively live, work and play. We prioritize relationships,fueland develop talent by creating growth opportunities, and succeed as one Target team. At our core, our purpose is ingrained in who we are, what we value, and how we work.It’show we care, grow, and win together

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineerwith strong experience in distributed systems and Java-based applicationsto join our team.

In this role, you will design, build, and operate scalable backend services, contribute to architecture decisions, and own services end-to-end in production You will work closely with cross-functional partnersto deliver reliable, high-performance systems.

Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Responsibilities:

• Design and buildhigh-quality, scalable, and resilient backend services using Java and Spring Boot

• Lead system design and architecture discussions, making informed trade-offs across performance, scalability, and reliability

• Own services end-to-end in production, ensuring availability, latency, and SLA adherence

• Drive best practices for distributed systems design, fault tolerance, and observability

• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, and set a high bar for engineering quality

• Conduct code reviewsand mentor engineers, improving overall team capability

• Troubleshoot complex production issues, lead root cause analysis, and implement durable fixes

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, UX, and platform teamsto deliver solutions end-to-end

• Partner with DevOps to enhance CI/CD pipelinesand optimize Kubernetes-based deployments

• Contribute to architecture governance, documenting designs, trade-offs, and operational runbooks

• Influence technical directionby evaluating tools, technologies, and system improvements

• Contribute to building next-generation platform capabilitiesleveragingagent-based and AI-driven orchestration systems

AboutYou

• Bachelor’s degreein Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

• 5+ yearsof professional software development experience

• Strong proficiency in Javaand deep experience with Spring Boot

• Proven experience building microservicesand RESTful APIs

• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles scalability, reliability, consistency, and fault tolerance

• Hands-on experience with messaging systems(e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ)

• Experience with cloud-native environments(Docker, Kubernetes)

• Strong database fundamentals across relational (MySQL/Postgres)and NoSQL (MongoDB/Redis)systems

• Experience with modern engineering practices Git, CI/CD, automated testing, and observability tools

• Strong problem-solving skillsand ability to drive solutions in ambiguous environments

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineersand influence technical decisions

• Proven track record of delivering reliable, scalable systems in production

Nice to have

• Experience with event-driven architecturesor streaming systems

• Exposure to high-scale, low-latency systems

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools(e.g., Terraform)

• Experience with performance tuning and system optimization

• Familiarity with AI-assisted developer tools(e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT)

• Familiarity with agentic platforms and AI-driven application architectures, including concepts like orchestration of autonomous agents, tool usage, and workflow-based systems