Lead Engineer - Roundel, Product Ads

The pay range for this position is $ – $. Pay is based on various factors including labor markets, education, experience, and certifications.

Target offers comprehensive health benefits—including medical, vision, dental, life insurance—and additional benefits such as 401(k), employee discount, short‑term and long‑term disability, paid sick leave, paid national holidays, and paid vacation.

As a Lead Engineer, you serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team that supports a product. You create and own the application architecture that best serves the product’s functional and non‑functional needs, identify and drive architectural changes to accelerate feature development or improve the quality of service, and influence the wider team as a technical leader.

Target Product Ads (TPA) is a Voltron‑backed service that delivers sponsored advertisements across key surfaces on

• Define and evolve application architecture to support scalable, reliable, and secure systems.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, including leading proof‑of‑concept initiatives.
• Drive engineering standards, reusable patterns, and best practices across teams.
• Lead design, development, and lifecycle management of services with enterprise impact.
• Guide testing, debugging, and performance optimization at platform scale.
• Partner with stakeholders to plan, prioritize, and deliver high‑impact solutions.
• Lead complex implementations, ensuring alignment with architectural and operational requirements.
• Identify risks, remove obstacles, and ensure successful delivery of initiatives.
• Establish monitoring, automation, and reliability practices, including disaster recovery strategies.
• Design and optimize data models; contribute to data standards and governance.
• Stay current with emerging technologies and Target’s evolving technical ecosystem.

• 4‑year degree or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of software development experience, including at least one full‑lifecycle implementation.
• Deep expertise in designing and building highly scalable distributed systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one JVM language (e.g., Java or Kotlin).
• Experience building RESTful services using Spring Boot, relational databases (e.g., Postgre
  
  SQL), caching (e.g., Redis), and event‑driven systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern deployment practices.
• Strong understanding of system performance, scalability, and operational health.
• Experience with data modeling and data lifecycle management concepts.
• Familiarity with GenAI frameworks, patterns, and AI‑assisted development tools (e.g., Git Hub Copilot).
• Strong analytical, problem‑solving, and critical thinking skills.
• Effective communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts.
• Proven ability to collaborate with cross‑functional teams and influence technical decisions.
• Ad‑tech domain experience is a plus.

This position is a hybrid/flex for your day arrangement. The team member’s core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ (MN) location and virtually, depending on tasks for that day. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location unless otherwise prescribed by Target.

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 contact candidate.acc