Senior Engineer – Workload Identity Platform (SPIFFE/SPIRE)

About the role

The Senior Engineer – Workload Identity Platform (SPIFFE/SPIRE) position is part of the Identity Engineering team, which delivers modern identity capabilities to secure workloads, applications, and infrastructure across Target's technology ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and support workload identity solutions using SPIFFE/SPIRE.
• Deploy, configure, and operate SPIRE Server and SPIRE Agent infrastructure.
• Design and manage SPIFFE trust domains and workload identity models.
• Implement and support X.509 SVID and JWT-SVID issuance, validation, rotation, and lifecycle management.
• Develop and maintain workload registration and attestation processes.
• Design and implement integrations between SPIRE, Kubernetes, and enterprise platforms.
• Develop custom SPIRE extensions, plugins, node attestors, or workload attestors where required.
• Partner with engineering teams to onboard workloads and applications to workload identity services.
• Implement identity-aware authentication and authorization patterns for distributed systems.
• Troubleshoot complex identity, authentication, authorization, and certificate lifecycle issues.
• Contribute to platform automation, observability, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Participate in architecture reviews and technical design discussions.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering best practices.

Requirements

• Four-year degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience designing, developing, and supporting production systems.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with SPIFFE/SPIRE or equivalent workload identity technologies.
• Strong software development experience in Go.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native applications and services in Kubernetes environments.
• Experience designing and troubleshooting distributed systems and microservice-based architectures.
• Experience implementing workload authentication, identity, and trust solutions for cloud-native platforms.
• Experience developing APIs, integrations, or platform services that operate at scale.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, and root-cause analysis skills.
• Ability to work across teams and influence technical solutions through collaboration and engineering excellence.

Qualifications

• Workload Identity & SPIFFE/SPIRE: Hands-on experience deploying and operating SPIRE Server and SPIRE Agents. Strong understanding of SPIFFE IDs, trust domains, and workload identity concepts. Experience implementing and managing X.509 SVIDs and JWT-SVIDs. Experience with workload and node attestation mechanisms. Familiarity with SPIRE Registration APIs and Workload APIs. Experience developing or extending SPIRE integrations.
• Software Engineering: Strong proficiency in Go. Experience building APIs, services, and distributed systems in Go. Experience developing integrations, plugins, or extensions for cloud-native platforms. Experience with Linux environments and troubleshooting. Experience with CI/CD automation and deployment pipelines.
• Kubernetes & Cloud-Native Technologies: Kubernetes administration and operations. Helm-based deployments and configuration management. Containerized application architectures. Cloud-native identity and workload security patterns. Experience operating services in production Kubernetes environments.

Skills

• Experience with Istio, Linkerd, or other service mesh technologies.
• Experience with Envoy proxy configuration and integration.
• Experience implementing mTLS for service-to-service authentication.
• Experience with Open Policy Agent (OPA).
• Experience with PKI and certificate lifecycle management.
• Experience with Java and/or Python.
• Experience operating SPIRE in large-scale Kubernetes environments.
• Experience with multi-cluster or multi-cloud workload identity architectures.
• Contributions to SPIFFE, SPIRE, Kubernetes, Envoy, or related open-source communities.

Benefits

Target offers comprehensive health benefits and programs, including medical, vision, dental, life insurance, and more, to help you and your family take care of your whole selves. Other benefits include 401(k), employee discount, short term disability, long term disability, paid sick leave, paid national holidays, and paid vacation. For more information, visit https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.