Principal Engineer - Cybersecurity Incident Response

The pay range is $ - $ 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.

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As a Principal Engineer supporting Cybersecurity Incident Response, you set the technical strategy for the engineering platforms, services, integrations, and automations that enable Target to investigate and respond to cyber threats. You set direction for how these capabilities are designed, developed, tested, deployed, and operationalized across multiple portfolios and drive adoption across TTS. You lead and approve engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements, including security, reliability, scalability, availability, performance, and maintainability.

This role combines principal-level engineering leadership with deep incident response expertise. You are expected to contribute directly during active investigations with the judgment and hands‑on capability of a principal incident response analyst, while translating investigative needs and lessons learned into durable technology and process improvements. You are a thought leader and mentor for engineers and incident responders and actively contribute to the broader cybersecurity and technical community.

Use your skills, experience and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals.

As a Principal Engineer, Cybersecurity Incident Response, you will take the lead as you... Set and communicate the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for incident response engineering, aligning security operations needs with Target's business and technical environments. Architect and lead the development of secure, reliable services, integrations, and automations using Python, APIs, event-driven patterns, and cloud-native technologies to accelerate triage, enrichment, evidence collection, analysis, containment, and recovery.

Establish and drive engineering standards for source control, peer review, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, observability, documentation, secrets management, access controls, and resilient operations. Lead the design, development, and lifecycle management of security operations (Sec Ops) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) capabilities, including production‑grade playbooks, integrations, case‑management workflows, data enrichment, and analyst‑facing tools. Provide hands‑on, principal analyst‑level incident commander support by leading complex or high‑severity cyber investigations.

Guide triage, hypothesis development, data collection, scoping, evidence analysis, timeline reconstruction, containment decisions, eradication, recovery, and clear documentation of findings and risk. Partner with incident responders, threat hunters, detection engineers, digital forensics, threat intelligence, Enterprise Architecture, and technology teams to convert investigative requirements and post‑incident findings into scalable capabilities. Assess the viability, applicability, security, maintainability, and cost implications of technical solutions through proofs of concept, prototypes, architecture reviews, vendor evaluations, and build‑versus‑buy decisions.

Define metrics and feedback loops that measure automation quality, platform reliability, investigative cycle time, analyst experience, and…