Principal Engineer

About Target: Target is an iconic brand, a Fortune 50 company and one of America's leading retailers. Target as a tech company?

Absolutely. We're the behind-the-scenes powerhouse that fuels Target's passion and commitment to cutting-edge innovation. We anchor every facet of one of the world's best-loved retailers with a strong technology framework that relies on the latest tools and technologies—and the brightest people—to deliver incredible value to guests online and in stores. Target Technology Services is on a mission to offer the systems, tools and support that guests and team members need and deserve. Our high-performing teams balance independence with collaboration, and we pride ourselves on being versatile, agile and creative. We drive industry-leading technologies in support of every angle of the business, and help ensure that Target operates smoothly, securely, and reliably from the inside out.

About org: Merchandising is a Portfolio within Target – Product Engineering that strives to provide reliable data that is core to our enterprise retail operations, including foundational data and aggregation services at scale for retail and commerce platforms. We deal with data around Pricing, Promotions, Item, Supplier, Owned Brand, Merch Planning, Space Presentation & Transitions(SPT) & Intelligence Automation.

About team: The Enterprise Item Systems Team plays a critical role in managing item information, which is essential to the success of our retail business. This data impacts various key business processes, from product discovery (via search engines, social platforms, and internal systems) to procurement, transportation, and customer purchase decisions.

As we sell products from multiple national brands, as well as our own private labels, this information is gathered from various sources, validated through specific business rules, and widely distributed for use across the organization. Our portfolio supports national brand vendors, 3rd-party sellers, and teams in merchandising, commerce, supply chain, finance, and fulfillment, delivering seamless experiences for both online and in-store shoppers.

As a Principal Engineer in Merchandising, you are a thought leader and trusted partner of product and technology teams defining solutions to highly complex and usually abstract business and technology problems. You solve problems impacting multiple lines of business and technologies often within capabilities critical to Target’s success. You define architecture strategies to deliver new or evolving business and technology capabilities and align partners to those strategies. You define and drive delivery of the subsequent architectural solutions that would evolve merchandising products. 

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

• Understand Target's business and technical environments and assist teams in resolving complex business challenges via technical solutions
• Assess viability/applicability/cost implication through POCs and prototypes.
• Collaborate with technical staff and Enterprise Architecture teams in setting technical direction across platform
• Drive technology lifecycle management and communication of standards/decisions to the engineering team.
• Lead designing and building services with deep focus on non-functional requirement including scalability, availability, performance, etc.
• Be a strong advocate of extreme agile and DevOps practices with engineers.
• Work with engineering leaders to build a high performing engineering team and provide technical leadership, coaching, motivation and participate in the selection of technical talent.

About you:
• 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 product engineering

• 4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction

Problem Solving:

• Has demonstrated success in solving complex technical problems in more than one technical or functional areas
• Demonstrated experience leading the design and delivery of enterprise-scale solutions within a large enterprise where the solutions spanned multiple lines of business 

Architecture & Technology

• Demonstrated experience defining architecture strategy for a new line of business or enterprise technology capability and driving delivery of the resulting solutions 
• Demonstrated experience building solutions with microservices and event-based architecture using JVM-based languages (Java, Kotlin etc)
• Experience in broad tech stack, frameworks, dbs and tools – Springboot, Micronaut, Mongo, Cassandra, Postgres, Elastic Search, Kafka, ReactJS, Cloud Tech etc

Leadership

• planning and organizational skills
• verbal, written, and presentation skills to convey complex technical solutions clearly to the organization
• interpersonal skills, the ability to influence others
• strong team player