Principal Threat Detection Operations Engineer

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. Find competitive benefits from financial and education to well-being and beyond at

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As a Principal Engineer supporting Threat Detection Operations, you set the technical strategy for the detection engineering, platforms, services, integrations, and automations that enable Target to detect cyber threats. You set direction for how these capabilities are designed, developed, tested, deployed, and operationalized across multiple portfolios and drive adoption across Target. 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 detection engineering expertise. You are expected to design, develop, and continuously improve scalable detection capabilities that identify sophisticated threats across complex environments, while applying strong investigative judgment to ensure detections are actionable, resilient, and aligned to evolving adversary behaviors. You translate threat intelligence, incident learnings, and emerging attack techniques into durable detection strategies, engineering solutions, and process improvements.

You are a thought leader and mentor for detection engineers and partner teams and actively contribute to the broader cybersecurity team and tech organization.

Use your skills, experience, and talents to be a part of groundbreaking thinking and visionary goals. As a Principal Engineer, Threat Detection Operations, you will take the lead as you…

• Set and communicate the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for detection engineering, aligning threat detection capabilities with Target's cybersecurity priorities, business risks, threat landscape, and technical environments.
• Architect and lead the development of scalable, reliable detection capabilities, services, integrations, and automations using Python, APIs, detection-as-code practices, event-driven patterns, and cloud-native technologies to identify malicious and anomalous activity across enterprise, cloud, identity, endpoint, network, and application environments.
• Establish and drive engineering standards for detection content, source control, peer review, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, observability, documentation, versioning, access controls, and resilient production operations.
• Lead the design, development, and lifecycle management of enterprise detection capabilities, including detection rules, behavioral analytics, correlation logic, detection pipelines, enrichment, alerting workflows, and analyst-facing tooling.
• Provide hands‑on, principal‑level leadership for complex detection and visibility challenges. Guide detection logic development, testing, tuning, validation, deployment, and continuous improvement…