Principal Engineer

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.

About the role

As a Principal Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will provide technical leadership and set the long-term architectural direction for how data is managed, governed, and observed across Target. This role is focused on influence at scale - shaping platforms, standards, and engineering practices that enable teams across the enterprise to build trusted, reliable, and compliant data products.

You will operate at the intersection of architecture, engineering excellence, and organizational alignment, ensuring the data platform foundation can support the scale, complexity, and regulatory needs of a large omni-channel retailer.

What you’ll do

• Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for Target’s Data Platform.
• Influence platform strategy across multiple teams and domains by setting standards, patterns, and best practices for data management, governance, metadata, lineage, data quality, and observability.
• Partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and data teams to align platform capabilities with business and regulatory requirements.
• Evaluate trade-offs holistically across systems, balancing scalability, reliability, usability, and operational excellence.
• Lead design reviews for complex, cross-cutting initiatives and guide teams toward cohesive, long-term solutions.
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers, raising the overall bar for technical decision-making and platform thinking.
• Serve as a technical thought leader, anticipating future needs and evolving the platform to support Target’s long-term data strategy.

About you:

• Deep experience designing and evolving large-scale data platforms in complex enterprise environments
• Strong background working with data warehouses, data lakes, and distributed data systems
• Expertise in data management and governance, including metadata, lineage, data quality, and observability
• Solid understanding of data fundamentals and distributed systems architecture
• Hands-on experience using Python, Scala, and/or Java to build and operate data pipelines
• Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases, NoSQL systems, modern data warehouses, and data lakes
• Experience designing batch and streaming data processing systems with a focus on reliability and scalability
• Proven experience building and operating cloud-based data platforms on AWS, GCP, and/or Azure
• Ability to define long-term architectural vision and influence technical direction across teams
• Strong systems thinker who evaluates trade-offs across scale, performance, reliability, and usability
• Experience leading design reviews and mentoring senior and staff-level engineers
• Clear communicator who can explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical partners
• Collaborative leader with strong planning, organizational, and problem-solving skills