Principal Engineer – Store Optimization

Job Id: R0000436244

The pay range is $168,000.00 - $303,000.00

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.

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 culture. Learn more about Target here. 

Store Optimization is the backbone of system-directed execution across Target stores, enabling intelligent task orchestration, routing, batching, and prioritization at enterprise scale. This ecosystem spans deeply interconnected capabilities including Task Ingestion, Task Optimization, Task Prioritization, and Maps & Routing.

As a Principal Engineer you define and drive unified architectural direction across this portfolio, ensuring alignment between near-term delivery and long-term platform scalability. This role will enable faster innovation while maintaining system integrity, resilience, and extensibility, shaping a durable, enterprise-grade platform for store and fulfillment operations.

Store Optimization is evolving into a unified execution platform powering system-directed work across 2,000+ stores and expanding fulfillment workflows. Architectural decisions made now will define how this platform scales enterprise wide. This is a highly interdependent system where batching, prioritization and ingestion directly impact routing efficiency, SL adherence and downstream optimization. At this scale, strong architectural cohesion is critical to ensure consistency, reuse, and long-term sustainability. This role establishes principal-level ownership to guide cross-product decisions, prevent fragmentation, and enable enterprise-wide alignment.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive unified architecture across Task Ingestion, Task Prioritization, Task Optimization, and Routing
• Lead the evolution toward goal-driven, intelligent task orchestration aligned to business outcomes (e.g., labor efficiency, sales recovery, SLA adherence)
• Establish multi-objective optimization frameworks to balance competing business priorities
• Simplify and standardize shared capabilities to reduce duplication and technical debt
• Ensure end-to-end system integrity across interconnected workflows
• Embed observability, guardrails, and explainability into AI-driven systems
• Partner across engineering, product, and data science to drive scalable, reusable platform design
• Align architectural decisions to measurable business and operational 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:

• 4-year degree or equivalent experience; continued learning in evolving technologies
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years setting technical strategy across teams or domains
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architecture (Kafka), and scalable platform design
• Strong hands-on experience with Java/Kotlin or Python; building API-first services (Spring Boot or Micronaut)
• Experience designing and operating cloud-native systems using Kubernetes and Docker
• Strong understanding of data systems (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) and observability (metrics, logging, tracing)
• Experience building and integrating AI/GenAI systems (LLMs, RAG, prompting, evaluation, guardrails)
• Proven ability to productionize AI systems, including performance, reliability, and enterprise integration
• Strong ability to translate business goals into technical strategy and drive cross-team architectural alignment
• Proven leadership and communication skills, with ability to influence senior stakeholders

Preferred experience:

• Experience with optimization, routing, or decisioning systems at scale
• Familiarity with graph algorithms, heuristics, or tools like OR-Tools
• Experience with agentic workflows, multi-agent systems, or human-in-the-loop orchestration
• Experience with GenAI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), vector databases, or semantic search
• Exposure to graph databases (e.g., Neo4j), knowledge graphs, or streaming data systems

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.