Senior Engineer – CircleCard Platform

Job Id: R0000445196

The pay range is $98,000.00 - $176,000.00

Pay is based on several factors which vary based on position. These include labor markets and in some instances may include education, work experience and certifications. In addition to your pay, Target cares about and invests in you as a team member, so that you can take care of yourself and your family. Target offers eligible team members and their dependents comprehensive health benefits and programs, which may include medical, vision, dental, life insurance and more, to help you and your family take care of your whole selves. Other benefits for eligible team members include 401(k), employee discount, short term disability, long term disability, paid sick leave, paid national holidays, and paid vacation. Find competitive benefits from financial and education to well-being and beyond at https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.

Senior Engineer – CircleCard Platform

About Us

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and inclusive culture.

As a Senior Engineer on the CircleCard Platform team, you'll design and build highly scalable, reliable platform capabilities that power critical CircleCard experiences across Target. You'll combine strong backend and distributed systems engineering expertise with modern AI application development to build the next generation of intelligent, AI-ready platform capabilities.

You'll serve as a technical leader, shaping architecture, influencing implementation decisions, and establishing engineering best practices. You'll work across APIs, data, events, integrations, large-scale file and data processing, distributed systems, and guest-facing backend capabilities, while also helping evolve the platform with domain AI agents, MCP tools and services, and agentic workflows.

You are equally comfortable solving complex distributed systems problems and applying emerging AI technologies where they create meaningful value. You bring strong software engineering fundamentals and build production systems that are secure, scalable, resilient, observable, and maintainable.

About the Team: CircleCard Platform

The CircleCard Platform team builds and operates the foundational platforms and services that power the CircleCard ecosystem. The team owns a suite of P1, multi-tenant systems, including our API Platform, Data Platform, Webhooks & Events Platform, and File Platform, enabling applications across Target and our partners to securely access, update, process, and integrate with CircleCard data and capabilities.

Our platforms power critical capabilities across the CircleCard account lifecycle, including account management, new account booking, payments, servicing, compliance processing, and enterprise and partner integrations. Our platform capabilities span high-volume APIs, event-driven integrations, large-scale data access and processing, and very large file ingestion and processing, supporting critical financial and non-financial workloads across the CircleCard ecosystem.

The team is also expanding its scope to build backend capabilities that directly power CircleCard guest experiences across Target's digital platforms, including richer account management experiences through Target Wallet.

As we evolve CircleCard Platform, we're investing in making our capabilities AI-ready and agent-accessible through domain AI agents, MCP tools and services, and intelligent workflows, while continuing to strengthen the scalability, resiliency, performance, and observability of our core platforms.

Current initiatives include:

• Evolving our API, Data, Webhooks/Events, and File platforms to support growing CircleCard capabilities and integrations.
• Building scalable data platform capabilities for accessing, processing, and distributing high-volume CircleCard data across multiple consumers.
• Building large-scale file ingestion and processing capabilities to reliably handle very large files and high-volume financial data workflows.
• Building backend capabilities that directly enable CircleCard guest experiences across Target's digital ecosystem.
• Building AI-ready platform capabilities, domain AI agents, and MCP-based tools and services.
• Expanding shared platform capabilities, including distributed caching and reusable platform services.
• Improving performance, scalability, resiliency, and observability across our P1 systems.
• Automating engineering and operational workflows through intelligent AI agents.

What You'll Do

Platform & Services Engineering

• Design, develop, and maintain highly scalable platform capabilities and backend services using Kotlin, Java, and Micronaut.
• Design and build secure, high-performance REST and GraphQL APIs supporting high-volume retail and financial workloads.
• Build reusable platform capabilities that can be safely consumed by multiple tenants, applications, integrations, and AI agents.
• Design and build event-driven integrations, webhooks, and asynchronous services using Kafka and modern messaging patterns.
• Design distributed systems using Kafka, asynchronous messaging, distributed caching, and cloud-native architecture patterns.
• Design and build large-scale data processing and data access capabilities, enabling applications and integrations to securely consume, process, and distribute high-volume CircleCard data.
• Design highly scalable file ingestion and processing systems capable of reliably processing very large files and high-volume data workloads with strong resiliency, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Design and optimize PostgreSQL databases, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization, and transactional integrity.
• Leverage Redis and distributed caching patterns to improve application performance, scalability, and resiliency.
• Build resilient, highly available P1 services and platforms with strong fault tolerance, scalability, security, and operational excellence.
• Design backend capabilities that directly enable guest-facing CircleCard experiences across Target's digital platforms.
• Lead technical design discussions, architecture reviews, code reviews, and implementation planning.
• Improve platform observability using OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging, and production monitoring.
• Continuously improve platform performance, scalability, resiliency, observability, and operational health.
• Partner closely with Product Management, UX, Architecture, Infrastructure, Data, and business stakeholders to deliver guest- and business-focused solutions.

AI Engineering

• Leverage AI-assisted software development tools throughout the software development lifecycle, including solution design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and code reviews.
• Collaborate effectively with AI coding assistants and enterprise AI platforms to improve engineering productivity while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, architecture, and maintainability.
• Apply sound engineering judgment to validate AI-generated code and technical recommendations through testing, peer reviews, and established software engineering practices.
• Design, build, and deploy production-grade AI-powered applications and agentic systems using Target-approved AI platforms, frameworks, and Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Develop domain-specific AI agents and multi-agent workflows capable of reasoning, planning, tool orchestration, memory management, and multi-step workflow execution.
• Design and build MCP tools and services that securely expose CircleCard platform and domain capabilities to AI agents and applications.
• Design and implement Prompt Engineering and Context Engineering strategies to improve AI application quality, reliability, and relevance.
• Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions leveraging enterprise knowledge sources, vector search technologies, and semantic retrieval.
• Optimize AI applications for response quality, latency, throughput, token utilization, reliability, and inference cost.
• Implement AI evaluation frameworks and apply responsible AI, security, privacy, governance, and observability best practices.
• Build reusable AI components, tools, libraries, workflows, and engineering accelerators that improve developer productivity and can be leveraged across the platform.
• Identify opportunities to use AI to improve developer productivity, platform operations, incident response, troubleshooting, and engineering workflows.
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities, lead proof-of-concept initiatives, and recommend adoption strategies that deliver measurable engineering or business value.
• Partner across engineering teams to integrate AI capabilities into products, platforms, and software development workflows.

About You

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience building enterprise-scale distributed applications, backend services, and platform capabilities.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with demonstrated experience designing, building, deploying, and operating production systems.

Platform & Services Engineering

• Expert-level proficiency in Kotlin and/or Java, with experience building microservices using Micronaut, Spring Boot, or similar frameworks.
• Strong experience designing distributed systems, platform capabilities, and service-oriented architectures.
• Strong experience designing and building REST and/or GraphQL APIs.
• Experience with Kafka-based event-driven architectures, asynchronous messaging, and webhooks/events.
• Experience designing large-scale data processing systems, including high-volume data access, transformation, and distribution patterns.
• Experience building large-file ingestion and processing systems, including asynchronous processing, partitioning, fault recovery, and performance optimization.
• Strong experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including data modeling, indexing, transactions, and query optimization.
• Experience with Redis, distributed caching, and high-performance data access patterns.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud-native architectures, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience building highly available, resilient, secure, observable, and performance-sensitive production systems.
• Strong understanding of API design, distributed system patterns, caching, asynchronous processing, data consistency, fault tolerance, and production operations.

AI Engineering

• Hands-on experience designing and building AI applications, AI-powered tools, or agentic systems using modern Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Experience building autonomous or multi-agent workflows using technologies such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, Google ADK, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent orchestration frameworks.
• Strong understanding of modern AI application architecture, including Prompt Engineering, Context Engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), tool calling, memory management, orchestration patterns, and AI evaluation.
• Experience designing tools, APIs, or services that enable AI agents to securely interact with enterprise systems and domain capabilities.
• Experience optimizing AI applications for quality, latency, token efficiency, reliability, and inference cost.
• Understanding of responsible AI, security, privacy, governance, and observability practices for production AI applications.
• Proficiency in Python for AI application development, automation, or AI tooling.
• Experience effectively leveraging AI coding assistants and AI-assisted engineering workflows while maintaining strong engineering standards.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Strong communication, collaboration, and technical leadership skills, with experience mentoring engineers, leading technical design discussions, influencing architecture, and driving engineering best practices.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and translate complex business and technical problems into scalable engineering solutions.
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams and balance short-term delivery with long-term platform architecture and maintainability.
• Strong ownership mindset with a focus on production excellence, reliability, and continuous improvement.
• Passion for applying emerging AI technologies to complex engineering and business challenges while maintaining strong software engineering fundamentals.

Why Join Us

CircleCard Platform sits at the foundation of one of Target's most critical financial ecosystems. Our P1 platforms and services enable applications and integrations across Target while supporting critical CircleCard account and transaction capabilities.

You'll have the opportunity to solve challenging platform and distributed systems problems at scale—building APIs, data capabilities, event-driven systems, large-scale file processing, integrations, caching, and reusable services used across the CircleCard ecosystem.

You'll also build backend capabilities that directly power guest experiences across Target's digital platforms, giving you the opportunity to work on both foundational platforms and capabilities with direct impact on Target guests.

As a Senior Engineer, you'll help shape the next generation of CircleCard Platform by building AI-ready services, domain AI agents, MCP tools and services, and intelligent agentic workflows that enable our platforms and domain capabilities to be consumed in new ways.

This is an opportunity to combine large-scale distributed systems, platform engineering, high-volume data and file processing, guest-facing backend engineering, and modern AI/agentic technologies while taking significant technical ownership of systems that are critical to CircleCard and Target.

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

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.