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.
About the Role
As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead the Core Platform Services team. You will partner closely with a Principal Engineer, the team’s Product Manager, and the leaders of peer platform teams to remove friction across the full builder experience and deliver the common services the rest of Target’s platforms build on.
You will be accountable for
Building and leading a high-performing team of platform, full-stack, and AI engineers, and growing its next layer of technical leaders.
Delivering a growing set of common services, starting with Action Center and agentic remediation, as highly available, multi-tenant services the whole enterprise relies on.
Treating builder experience as the product. Working with the Product Manager to find the biggest sources of friction, setting targets for adoption, completion, and reduced manual work across every kind of builder, and holding the team accountable for hitting them.
Earning adoption from peer platform teams. Helping them integrate with our services, from publishing work through Action Center to building on the capabilities that come next, and making our services the obvious choice for them.
Applying AI safely. Automating work where the agents have proven reliable, keeping people in the review loop everywhere else, and making builder trust a goal the team owns.
Operational excellence. Running 24x7 business-critical services with the discipline, on-call health, and incident rigor a shared dependency demands.
Connecting across the enterprise. Building relationships with engineering leaders 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 your team in cross-domain architecture and enterprise planning forums.
At Target scale, vendor defaults often do not apply. You will lead engineers solving multi-tenant platform, workflow, and agentic AI problems that are not documented in standard playbooks.
Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity in ambiguous environments.
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 Senior Engineering Manager, you will build a team that works this way and help the platform teams around you make the same shift.
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
Established Action Center as the default way platform teams reach builders, replacing duplicated per-team tooling
Measurably reduced the time it takes a builder to go from "the platform needs something from me" to done
Scaled agentic remediation across high-volume platform work, with builder trust measured by how often agent-opened pull requests are reviewed and merged
Used builder-experience data and input from engineering leaders across Target, together with the Product Manager, to deliver new capabilities beyond Action Center where builders lose the most time
Made it possible for product managers, designers, and data scientists to ship safely through the platform alongside engineers
Built a strong, inclusive, and accountable engineering culture aligned to enterprise outcomes
Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.
About You
You are a technical leader first and a people leader always. You are comfortable in architecture discussions, API and workflow design, multi-tenant systems, and failure analysis, while coaching engineers to grow in scope and influence. You have strong opinions about builder experience and the evidence to back them.
4 year degree or equivalent experience
7+ years of engineering (software development) experience
1-3 years of managing teams with a strong track record of delivery for cross-functional product experience with Cloud hosting and managing products
Coaching and mentoring engineers on architecture and modern engineering practices
Building and operating internal platforms, developer tooling, or shared services used by other teams
Driving adoption of a platform or standard across an organization through influence
Supporting and operating 24x7 business-critical capabilities
Designing and deploying scalable APIs and microservices in a multi-tenant environment
Applying LLMs or agentic AI to real engineering workflows, including the guardrails that make them safe to ship
Instrumenting products with metrics, logs, and traces to make them observable by default
Communicating complex technical solutions clearly to diverse audiences
Working effectively across multiple teams in a product-oriented environment
Minimum Qualifications
In-depth knowledge of system design, build, test, and operational debugging practices
Demonstrated experience delivering production systems at scale
Experience leading engineering teams and developing engineers
Commitment to continuous learning and staying current with evolving technologies
Join Us
If you want to lead at enterprise scale, build the services every other platform depends on, and make Target a better place to build software, this is your opportunity.
Come build the systems that help millions of guests discover the joy of everyday life.
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. Click here if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.
Benefits Eligibility
Please paste this url into your preferred browser to learn about benefits eligibility for this role: https://tgt.biz/BenefitsForYou_E
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
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 reach out to candidate.accommodations@HRHelp.Target.com. Non-accommodation-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.
