Lead Engineer - Email and Data Protection (Cybersecurity)

As a Lead Engineer, you will use your technology acumen and engineering leadership to shape, build, and sustain enterprise-scale capabilities. You will maintain deep knowledge of current and emerging technologies, evaluate their viability within Target’s environment, and guide decisions based on security, scalability, maintainability, reliability, and total cost of ownership.

You will lead technical design, research, proof-of-concept work, testing strategy, debugging, and lifecycle management for services with broad enterprise impact. In complex and unstructured situations, you will serve as an expert resource, establish reusable engineering patterns and standards, and help teams deliver secure, high-performing, and resilient solutions.

ABOUT THIS TEAM

The Email and Data Protection team protects Target’s team members, guests, systems, and data from threats delivered through email and other business communication channels. We engineer, manage, and operate Target’s enterprise email security ecosystem, including vended security platforms, internally developed services, and advanced integrations with Target’s Strelka analysis platform, Google Security

Operations, and other cybersecurity capabilities.

Our work spans both software engineering and security operations. We build and enhance scalable services that ingest, process, scan, enrich, and route real-time email data, while maintaining the availability, reliability, and effectiveness of the security controls that protect Target every day. We support cybersecurity partners with actionable data, alerts, investigative capabilities, and operational expertise.

Because email security controls directly support business communications, we balance strong protection with the need to keep Target operating efficiently. We investigate security events, resolve platform and data-processing issues, tune controls, and partner across the business to reduce risk while minimizing unnecessary disruption.

Cybersecurity is a rapidly evolving engineering domain. Threat actors are increasingly using sophisticated automation and artificial intelligence, creating meaningful opportunities to build adaptable platforms and modern defenses at enterprise scale.

Deep cybersecurity experience is not required. Strong platform, backend, and distributed-systems experience can translate successfully into this engineering leadership role within Target’s Cybersecurity organization., * Provide technical leadership for the engineering, operation, reliability, and lifecycle management of Target’s enterprise email security platforms and supporting services.

• Lead the design, development, and maintenance of scalable backend services using Java, Spring Boot, and other modern languages and frameworks.
• Lead the design and enhancement of scalable services that ingest, process, scan, enrich, and route real-time email data for security detection, investigation, and response.
• Design and enhance integrations with vended email security products, Target’s Strelka platform.
• Google Security Operations, and other security detection, alerting, and response capabilities.
• Establish engineering patterns and standards for APIs, event streams, data models, automated testing, observability, resiliency, and secure service development.
• Lead technical design reviews, code reviews, proof-of-concept efforts, and decisions involving platform architecture and technology selection.
• Establish effective operational practices for monitoring, incident response, problem management, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and production readiness.
• Partner with cybersecurity, messaging, infrastructure, and business teams to investigate security events, resolve complex platform issues, and provide reliable data and capabilities to security partners.
• Continuously improve and tune security controls, platform reliability, and operational processes to reduce risk while minimizing unnecessary disruption to legitimate business communications.
• Guide database schema evolution, data migrations, API contracts, and backward-compatible platform changes.
• Advance CI/CD, automated unit and integration testing, infrastructure automation, and modern DevOps practices.
• Coach and mentor engineers, raise the technical capabilities of the team, and foster a culture of ownership, learning, and continuous improvement.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools, and apply them responsibly to improve engineering quality and delivery

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

Not everybody will meet every requirement. We would still like to hear from you if this role and its mission interest you.

• Four-year degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including experience leading the design and delivery of complex platform-oriented solutions.
• Strong backend engineering experience with Java and Spring Boot, plus proficiency in at least one additional modern programming language.
• Experience designing, building, and supporting distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive applications.
• Experience developing RESTful APIs, backend services, and integrations across enterprise systems.
• Strong understanding of automated testing, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing strategies.
• Experience troubleshooting production systems and resolving complex issues involving applications, data pipelines, and system integrations.
• Experience with relational databases, schema design, data migrations, and data lifecycle considerations.
• Demonstrated ability to solve ambiguous technical problems through analytical thinking, experimentation, and innovative problem-solving.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through architecture decisions, design reviews, engineering standards, coaching, and mentoring.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions and risks to engineering, security, and business stakeholders.
• A continuous-improvement mindset with a history of proactively identifying and addressing technical gaps, operational risks, or inefficiencies.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with cloud-native application development in Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure.
• Experience with messaging and event-streaming technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, or JMS.
• Experience with containers and orchestration platforms, including Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with observability practices and tools for metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and service-level objectives.
• Experience working in cybersecurity, email security, or another highly available and risk-sensitive production environment.
• Familiarity with email processing and enterprise messaging concepts, including SMTP, MIME, message routing, and email authentication controls.
• Experience integrating with security analytics, SIEM, detection, or response platforms, including Google Security Operations.
• Experience using AI-assisted or agentic software engineering tools such as Claude Code, OpenCode, or Codex.

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