Lead Engineer - Target India

Job Id: R0000430051

We’re building a modern, enterprise-grade Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform for Target — a unified foundation to power omni-channel marketing at scale. The platform will deliver scalable, resilient, and intelligent services to ingest, enrich, and distribute digital assets and campaign metadata seamlessly across enterprise systems in real time.

This is a rare opportunity to help scale the application to 5× its current volume, integrate with complex upstream and downstream systems, and shape the architecture, technology strategy, and engineering culture of a next-generation platform within Target’s ecosystem.

Position Overview: To succeed in this role, you’ll bring over 7+ years of experience in software design and development, with 5+ years focused on building scalable backend applications. You’ll be a proven leader in guiding technical teams and driving products at scale to successful completion. Your expertise will lie in JVM-based technologies, specifically Java and Kotlin, along with a deep understanding of building robust, scalable systems.

As a lead engineer you would be responsible for

• Evaluate new technologies and participates in decision-making, accounting for several factors such as viability within Target’s technical environment, maintainability, and cost of ownership. Initiate and execute research and proof-of-concept activities for new technologies.
• In complex and unstructured situations, serve as an expert resource to create and improve standards and best practices to ensure high-performance, scalable, repeatable, and secure deliverables. Lead the design, lifecycle management, and total cost of ownership of services.
• Designing scalable architecture with the best choice of tech, responsible for all the services/functionalities that the team develops while ensuring quality of the team's code and/or infrastructure standards.
• Hands-on development, often taking on the more complicated tasks. Ensures solution is production ready, deployable, scalable and resilient.
• Provide the team with thought leadership to promote re-use and develop consistent, scalable patterns. Participate in planning services that have enterprise impact. Provide suggestions for handling routine and moderately complex technical problems, escalating issues when appropriate.
• Ensures product observability is in place for reliability. Fosters a culture of observability across teams and helps use operational data to improve stability and performance of their domains. Drives monitoring work on their team based on the organization's monitoring philosophy. Is aware of the operational data for their team’s domain and uses it as a basis for driving changes to the team's services to achieve stability and performance improvements.
• Integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and GenAI-powered features into core applications.
• Build robust systems that mitigate hallucinations and improve AI reliability.
• Experience building agentic frameworks and AI-driven automation for process enhancement
• Influence data standards, policies, and procedures. Install, configure, and/or tune data management solutions with minimal guidance. Monitor data management solution(s) and identify optimization opportunities.

Must Have Skills:

• Java & Python (Advanced proficiency in backend, AI, and automation workflows using Java and Python)
• Microservices Architecture (Designing, developing, and managing scalable microservices)
• Spring Boot or Micronaut (Experience with JVM-based frameworks, including reactive programming)
• AI / LLM Integration (Integrating Large Language Models and GenAI features into core applications)
• AI Reliability & Automation (Building agentic frameworks, reducing hallucinations, and improving process automation using OpenAI APIs and SDKs)
• Messaging Systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Databases (Experience with NoSQL databases like Cassandra, MongoDB, and SQL-based databases like PostgreSQL)
• CI/CD (Building and managing pipelines with Jenkins, GitLab, or similar tools)
• Unit and Integration Testing (Spock, JUnit, Test Containers for Java; PyTest, Unittest for Python)
• Cloud Services (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Containerization and Orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Monitoring & Observability (Grafana, ELK Stack, Prometheus)
• Event-Driven Architecture (Knowledge of event-driven patterns in distributed systems)

Good to Have Skills:

• Functional Programming (Familiarity with functional programming paradigms in Kotlin)
• GraphQL (Experience designing and integrating GraphQL APIs)
• Legacy System Modernization (Experience refactoring and modernizing older systems)
• Security Best Practices (OWASP, vulnerability scanning, secure coding principles)
• Agile Methodologies (Familiar with Scrum, Kanban, or other agile processes)