Lead Engineer - GenAI

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement autonomous AI agents capable of multi-step reasoning, task planning, tool usage, memory/state management, and iterative execution.
• Lead development of multi-agent coordination frameworks, agent orchestration layers, workflow engines, and tool invocation pipelines.
• Apply hands-on expertise with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Gemini, etc.) including prompt engineering, model adaptation, and inference optimization.
• Build and operationalize evaluation systems to measure agent accuracy, robustness, cost efficiency, latency, and reliability.
• Implement safety and trust mechanisms including content filters, alignment techniques, hallucination mitigation, monitoring pipelines, and auditability.
• Build data pipelines to support training and fine-tuning, synthetic data generation, feature stores, and real-time inference workflows.
• Use technology acumen to evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, execute research/proof-of-concepts, and establish scalable engineering patterns and best practices.
• Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description.

Requirements

• A 4 year degree or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of software development experience with at least one full cycle implementation.
• Demonstrates strong domain-specific knowledge regarding Target’s technology capabilities, and key competitors’ products and differentiating features.
• Proficiency in Java and Python.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Open/Elasticsearch, Object Storage (S3/etc.).
• Hands-on experience with modern LLM ecosystems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Gemini, etc.) and productionizing GenAI capabilities.
• Strong knowledge of emerging GenAI patterns, frameworks and use-cases, including: LangGraph / LangChain / Google GenAI, etc.
• Context Engineering / RAG / Agentic AI Experience designing scalable, reliable systems with strong performance, cost, and operational health awareness.
• Strong stakeholder communication and ability to lead through influence across teams and partners.
• Experience building highly scalable distributed systems.
• Demonstrates broad and deep expertise in multiple computer languages and frameworks (e.g., open source).

Qualifications

• Experience with planning algorithms (ReAct, Tree-of-Thought, HTN), policy learning, reward modeling, and agent performance optimization strategies.

Skills

• Java and Python proficiency.
• PostgreSQL, Open/Elasticsearch, Object Storage (S3/etc.) experience.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLM ecosystems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Gemini, etc.).
• Strong knowledge of emerging GenAI patterns, frameworks and use-cases.
• Context Engineering / RAG / Agentic AI experience.
• Scalable, reliable system design and development.
• Broad and deep expertise in multiple computer languages and frameworks.

Benefits

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.