Principal Engineer - Core Platform Services

As a Principal Engineer, you are the senior-most individual-contributor technical leader on the Core Platform Services team. You partner with the Senior Engineering Manager and the team’s Product Manager to set the technical vision, architecture, and standards for the team, and to remove friction across the full builder experience. This is a hands-on role: you lead through depth, design, and influence rather than through direct reports.

Principal Engineers operate at the overall Infrastructure level. While you are assigned to Core Platform Services, you are expected to contribute meaningfully to broader Infrastructure priorities, including problems that lie outside your team.

You will be accountable for

• Technical direction. Owning the end-to-end architecture of Core Platform Services as it grows, from Action Center and agentic remediation today to the features and integrations that come next, along with the APIs and MCP servers that other platform teams and AI agents build on.
• The hardest problems. Designing multi-tenant systems that many independent teams can extend without breaking each other, and AI agents that can safely change code for builders. That means least-privilege access, a clear record of every change, and human review.
• Platform as a product. Partnering with the Product Manager to treat builder experience as an internal product, with self-service by default, adoption you can measure, and services that work for builders with or without a deep engineering background.
• Engineering standards. Setting technical standards and leading design and architecture reviews across the team and partner platform teams.
• Infrastructure impact. Contributing to Infrastructure-wide technical priorities beyond Core Platform Services.
• Enterprise influence. Building relationships with Principal Engineers across Target to learn where builders hit the most friction and where the biggest opportunities are, and working with the Product Manager to turn what you learn into the roadmap. You also represent Core Platform Services in enterprise architecture forums.

Success in this role requires exceptional technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity and consensus in ambiguous, high-scale environments.

What We’re Looking For

This role is defined by three pillars. We expect a Principal Engineer to be outstanding across all three:

• Technical Depth. Deep, current expertise in distributed systems and multi-tenant platform design, including APIs and extension models, durable workflow orchestration, event-driven systems, and identity and authorization. Hands-on experience with LLM and agentic systems, including tool use and MCP, evaluation, and guardrails. You can go deep enough to debug the system and broad enough to shape the platform.
• Technical Leadership. Proven ability to influence across an organization without direct authority. You set standards, build architectural consensus across teams that do not report to you, and mentor senior engineers. You make the engineers around you better and bring clarity to ambiguous, contested problems.
• Platform / Product. A product mindset toward internal platforms. You judge success by adoption and builder experience, and you design for self-service so builders can get what they need without filing a request.

Why This Role Is Compelling

This role sits at the center of one of Target’s top enterprise priorities. Every hour of manual work this team removes is an hour returned to builders across Target.

You are joining at a turning point. Target is moving from a sequential software development lifecycle, where work passes from one stage and one team to the next, to an AI-driven development lifecycle (AI-DLC), where builders and AI agents plan, build, test, and fix in continuous loops. As Principal Engineer, you will define how AI agents safely change code across more than 5,000 applications.

You will

• Shape how thousands of builders across Target create software, from engineers to product managers, designers, and data scientists
• Find and remove the biggest sources of friction in how Target builds software
• Lead the shift from “file a ticket and wait” to AI agents that resolve platform work directly
• Build the shared foundations every other platform team depends on

If you are motivated by scale, impact, and deep technical challenges, this role offers all three.

What Success Looks Like

Within 6 to 12 months, you will have:

• Ratified a clear architecture and technical roadmap for Core Platform Services, shaped with Principal Engineers across Target and the Product Manager, and adopted by the platform teams that build on it
• Established the remediation guide framework as the way multiple platform domains deliver fixes to builders
• Delivered agentic remediation in production that builders and leadership trust
• Measurably reduced builder time to completion and eliminated duplicated tooling across platform teams
• Strengthened the senior engineering bench through design leadership, mentorship, and durable technical standards
• Made a visible, meaningful contribution to at least one Infrastructure-wide priority beyond Core Platform Services

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

You are a technical leader who leads through depth and influence. You are energized by platform architecture, distributed systems, and applied AI, and equally by helping other engineers grow in scope and impact., * 4 year degree or equivalent experience. Continuing education to maintain thorough knowledge of technical domains along with staying current in latest technologies

• 12+ years of experience in technology development or services
• 4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction
• Architecting and operating internal platforms, developer tooling, or shared services used by other teams
• Designing multi-tenant systems with extension points that other teams build against
• Building and securing production LLM or agentic systems, including evaluation, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop design
• Supporting and operating 24x7 business-critical capabilities
• Designing and deploying scalable APIs, microservices, and event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka)
• Depth in one or more platform languages such as Golang, and orchestration with Kubernetes
• Communicating complex technical solutions clearly to technical and non-technical audiences
• Working effectively across multiple teams in a product-oriented environment, * In-depth knowledge of system design, build, test, and operational debugging practices
• Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering production distributed systems at scale
• A track record of sustained technical influence and standard-setting across multiple engineering teams
• Commitment to continuous learning and staying current with evolving technologies

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and culture. Learn more about Target here (https://corporate.target.com/about) .

As a Principal Engineer you set the strategy for software development and/or infrastructure engineering at Target. You set the direction for how software and infrastructure engineering efforts will be designed, developed, and operationalized across multiple portfolios and drives adoption across tech. You lead and approve software and infrastructure engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements. You are a thought leader and mentor for internal and external technical talent and actively contribute to the external technical community.

Technology is one of Target’s top four enterprise priorities. It plays an outsized role in powering growth, speed, reliability, and innovation across the company. From merchandising and supply chain to stores and digital, our technology platforms directly enable the most critical outcomes for 2026 and beyond.

Target Tech builds and operates the intelligence powered architecture that fuels these outcomes. Our teams design scalable platforms, modern data ecosystems, and resilient infrastructure that allow thousands of engineers to deliver secure, high performing systems at enterprise scale.

About the Core Platform Services Team

Target’s Infrastructure strategy is built around one idea: make the right thing the easy thing. The Target Application Platform (TAP) is where that happens. Builders tell TAP what they need, and the platform, more and more with help from AI agents, gets it done safely. In an agentic world, many more people create software. Builders at Target include engineers, product managers, UX designers, data scientists, and analysts.

Core Platform Services builds the common services that connect Target’s platforms, so builders get a delightful experience that feels like one connected platform. We work closely with our Product Manager to find where builders lose the most time and decide what to build next.

Our first major capability is Action Center, along with the tools that help builders act on it:

• Action Center. A shared service and API that platform teams use to publish the work they need from builders, such as instrumenting with OpenTelemetry or upgrading a runtime. It tracks that work across the more than 5,000 applications on TAP and gives each one a single prioritized list, in place of requests scattered across tickets, chat, and email.
• Remediation guides. A shared framework that lets a platform team write the fix for a common problem once and make it available to every application.
• Agentic remediation. AI agents that follow a guide, make the code change, and open a pull request for the builder to review, either in the background on TAP or inside the builder’s own coding agent. A person approves every change.

Action Center is a starting point. Over time, the team will build the features and integrations that remove friction across the full builder experience, from starting a new project to running it in production. We track adoption, time to complete, and manual work removed, and use that data to decide what comes next.

We serve two groups: the builders who create software on TAP, and the platform teams who support them. We earn adoption by building services people want to use, and we measure success in builder time returned. The platform has already given back more than 500,000 hours, and this team’s work is a big part of growing that number.

We operate business-critical services in 24x7 production environments. Technologies commonly used across the team include Golang, Kubernetes, Kafka, React, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and agentic AI patterns.