Senior Engineer — Database Platform

Senior Engineer — Database Experience Platform

As a Senior Engineer on the Database Experience (DBX) team, you will own and evolve the platform that powers managed database infrastructure for hundreds of engineering teams across Target. The DBX platform manages multiple RDBMS and No

SQL database technologies across on-prem Virtual Machines, Kubernetes, and GCP.

You will work across the platform's core backend services — workflow automation, inventory, and lifecycle orchestration. Core responsibilities are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

Core Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable backend services that drive database lifecycle automation — provisioning, upgrades, HA conversion, snapshots, and decommission.
• Own systems end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, and production support.
• Build and evolve durable Temporal workflows, including correctness, replay safety, and versioning for in-flight migrations.
• Contribute to platform modernization — migrating legacy automation to Temporal and integrating with next-generation infrastructure platforms.
• Maintain and support CI/CD pipelines, including build configuration and test automation
• Participate in design and code reviews; influence engineering standards and technical direction.
• Triage operational issues, improve observability, and eliminate repeat occurrences.
• Collaborate with DBAs, platform engineers, and product stakeholders to translate operational requirements into reliable, scalable solutions.

About You

Required

• 4-year degree or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of backend software engineering
• Strong proficiency in Java/Spring Boot or similar JVM frameworks
• Experience designing and building REST APIs and distributed systems
• Proven ability to own systems in production, including troubleshooting and reliability improvements
• Strong collaboration and communication skills

Helpful But Not Required

• Production Temporal experience — workflow versioning and replay determinism
• Familiarity with API-driven automation
• Understanding of infrastructure performance and topology concerns relevant to stateful database workloads
• Experience in creating and supporting UI/UX for internal platforms, including React/Type Script and design systems
• Kafka producer/consumer patterns
• JPA/Hibernate database schema design
• Spock/Groovy testing
• Kubernetes familiarity (Stateful Sets, PVCs, pod disruption budgets)
• Observability practices — metrics, distributed tracing, SLOs

Technologies

Java
· Spring Boot
· Temporal
· Apache Kafka
· JPA/Hibernate
· Flyway
· PostgreSQL
· Cassandra
· MongoDB
· Redis
· Elastic Search
· Kubernetes
· GCP
· Gradle
· Vela CI
· Micrometer/Grafana

This position will operate as a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Target's needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team member's core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned to and virtually, depending upon what your role, team and tasks require for that day.

Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target.  if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.