Lead Engineer - Security Engineering​/Secrets Portal

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

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Target’s Cybersecurity team is a place where innovation happens daily. Interested in a culture that combines invention and creative freedom, ongoing learning, engineering excellence, and stellar outcomes? We are too – that’s why we work here. Join our team to take new application security solutions from concept to release, collaborating with developers and security engineers to innovate on helping secure Target’s network using cutting-edge technologies.

Our team creates and supports detection and other security-relevant tooling that is deployed across our environment. As a Lead Engineer, you will use your expertise to address complex problems and ensure continuous improvements for Target’s defensive capabilities. We are looking for an experienced Backend or Fullstack Engineer to drive the evolution of our Go-based detection platform. In this role, you will build and maintain high-throughput consumer pipelines (YARA/YARA-X), secure secrets management workflows (Vault/KMS), and resilient asynchronous orchestration.

You will work at the intersection of backend systems, cryptography and data engineering to deliver scalable security solutions at scale!

Platform Development:
Maintain and extend a high-performance detection platform comprising consumer rule processors (YARA/YARA‑X), event producers, APIs, and asynchronous workflows.

Secrets Management:
Own the design and operation of Vault-backed secrets flows and encryption proxies (KMS); review and harden key usage patterns and remediation life cycles.

Data & Storage:
Implement and optimize Postgres schema migrations and query performance. Integrate search capabilities (Solr/Lucene) when required.

Reliability & Scale:
Troubleshoot high-throughput pipelines (Kafka/Benthos), ensuring idempotency, back pressure handling, and effective instrumentation (traces/metrics).

Engineering Excellence:
Improve test coverage (unit, integration, golden tests), refine CI/CD pipelines (golangci-lint), and optimize Docker-based developer workflows.

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

4 year degree or equivalent experience.

7+ years of software development experience in Go services, modules, and tests with deep domain knowledge in package-specific configuration and deployment.

Ability to design new testing methods and resolve complex technical issues with minimal assistance.

3+ years of experience designing/operating Vault integrations and KMS-style key handling, including secure key life cycles.

Practical experience with YARA/YARA‑X or similar pattern engines. Familiarity with string-search algorithms (e.g., Aho–Corasick) is a plus.

3+ years Postgres experience (migrations, indexing, tuning).

Experience with Kafka stream-processing patterns; comfort with Benthos or equivalent.

Proficiency with Docker/Docker Compose, Docker file optimization and Makefile-driven workflows.

Working knowledge of Open Telemetry, distributed tracing, and metrics instrumentation.

Deep…