IAM Sr Engineer 

About us:

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that purpose to life through our values, our inclusive culture, and our commitment to innovation. Learn more about Target here.

As part of Target Cybersecurity, the Identity and Access Management (IAM) Engineering team builds the platforms and capabilities that protect the entire organization and empower teams to operate securely at scale. Identity is the foundation of every modern security program, and Target’s IAM ecosystem supports a global workforce at enterprise scale. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer who brings curiosity, craftsmanship, and technical depth to help evolve our IAM capabilities and influence the next generation of identity platforms. This role offers substantial engineering impact, end-to-end ownership, and the opportunity to collaborate with strong peers in a culture focused on continuous improvement and learning.

What You Will Do:

• Design, architect, and build secure, scalable IAM services using modern engineering practices and an enterprise-grade Java-based technology stack.

• Take end-to-end ownership of solutions, including requirements analysis, architecture, development, testing, deployment, observability, and long-term reliability.

• Engineer systems that balance high throughput, low latency, resiliency, and security to support mission-critical identity operations.

• Contribute to architectural decisions, design reviews, and long-term technical roadmaps for IAM services.

• Integrate AI-driven capabilities, including risk-aware access identification and contextual access recommendations to improve automation and decision-making.

• Lead by example through code quality, careful design tradeoffs, and disciplined engineering practices.

• Mentor peers and help elevate team capabilities while constructively challenging your peers in technical discussions.

• Participate in an engineering culture grounded in SecDevOps, SRE-aligned practices, design reviews, experimentation, blameless retrospectives, and continuous learning.

About you:

• Four-year degree or equivalent practical experience.

• Five or more years of professional software engineering experience.

• Strong proficiency in Java or a comparable object-oriented programming language.

• Experience designing, developing, and consuming RESTful APIs.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts and modern software design patterns.

• Ability to independently troubleshoot, optimize, and enhance complex systems.

• Demonstrated capability to deliver scalable, secure, high-performance software solutions.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate with engineering and product partners.

• Commitment to ongoing learning and staying current with emerging technologies.

Preferred experience:

• Experience with test automation and test-driven development using frameworks such as JUnit or JaCoCo.

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and tools, including Docker, or Vela.

• Experience implementing or instrumenting observability frameworks such as OpenTelemetry for metrics, logs, and traces.

• Experience with databases such as Postgres, Oracle, MongoDB, or Elasticsearch.

• Exposure to distributed event streaming technologies such as Kafka.

• Working knowledge of identity and access management concepts or identity-centric security.

• Experience with Unix-based operating systems such as Linux or Ubuntu.

• Familiarity with modern JavaScript UI development frameworks, including React.

• Familiarity with artificial intelligence frameworks and concepts such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), autonomous Agents, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Work Arrangement:

This position follows Target’s Hybrid/Flex for Your Day model, requiring a minimum of two days onsite per week at the designated Target headquarters location in Minnesota. Depending on role needs, work may be performed onsite or remotely within the United States. Work duties cannot be performed outside the country of the primary work location unless otherwise prescribed by Target.