Lead Engineer - Ad Tech

Role Overview: As a Lead Engineer (Ad Tech & Applied AI), you will provide technical leadership across backend platforms and emerging AI-powered capabilities. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to help define the technology strategy for Ad Tech platforms, including DSP, SSP and Ad Servers, supporting self-service advertising needs. You will assess build-versus-buy decisions for new capabilities through POCs and prototypes while considering long-term architecture, scalability, reliability and operational trade-offs. A key part of this role will be designing and building production-grade applications powered by Large Language Models and agentic systems from experimentation through production operation and continuous evaluation. We are looking for engineers who have moved beyond conversational AI prototypes and have experience engineering LLM-powered systems that operate reliably within real business workflows. You will design architectures that combine deterministic software components with probabilistic AI capabilities, making deliberate decisions about where traditional code, rules and workflow engines should be used versus where LLM-driven reasoning and autonomous agents provide value. You will lead engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements and assist teams in solving complex business challenges through scalable technical solutions. You will work closely with engineering managers to build high-performing engineering teams and provide technical leadership, architecture guidance, coaching and mentoring. You will also participate in the selection of technical talent and contribute actively to Target’s broader technical community. About you: You have 8+ years of software development experience, with experience designing, building and operating complex distributed systems through at least one complete implementation lifecycle. You have strong backend engineering fundamentals and are comfortable designing scalable APIs, microservices, asynchronous systems and data-intensive applications. You are fluent in Java / Spring and microservices architecture, with experience building highly available production systems. You have experience working with databases including RDBMS and No SQL technologies such as Cassandra and Mongo DB, and understand data modeling and storage trade-offs. You have experience building distributed event-driven architectures using technologies such as Kafka. You understand Ad Tech business fundamentals and how technology supports business objectives, and can translate business vision into technical strategy while understanding architectural and financial trade-offs. Experience building or integrating DSP, SSP or Ad Server technology platforms in support of self-service advertising is preferred. Applied AI & LLM Engineering You have hands-on experience designing, building and operating production applications using LLMs, beyond chat interfaces, prompt experimentation and proof-of-concept applications. You have designed and optimized production-grade RAG systems, with strong understanding of data ingestion and chunking, retrieval and ranking, context and grounding, hybrid retrieval, and evaluation. You have experience with knowledge graphs and graph-based retrieval, and understand when to use vector search, Graph RAG, structured queries, traditional search or hybrid approaches based on the problem and data. You understand the engineering trade-offs of production LLM systems, including quality, latency, cost, reliability, observability, security and failure handling, and can systematically improve retrieval and overall system performance rather than relying primarily on prompt engineering. Agentic Systems You have designed or built agentic applications or orchestration frameworks where LLM-powered components interact with tools, APIs, retrieval systems and other agents to accomplish multi-step tasks. You understand concepts such as: Tool/function calling Agent planning and execution Workflow and state management Multi-agent orchestration Agent memory and context management Routing and delegation Human-in-the-loop workflows Guardrails and policy enforcement Retry, timeout and fallback strategies Agent observability and traceability Evaluation of agent behavior and task completion You understand the distinction between deterministic and non-deterministic execution paths and can design systems that deliberately combine both. You know when a business workflow should remain deterministic and testable using conventional software and when probabilistic reasoning using an LLM or agent is appropriate. You design AI systems assuming that model outputs can be incorrect or unpredictable and therefore incorporate appropriate validation, constraints, structured outputs, fallbacks, idempotency, observability and human intervention where required. AI Quality & Evaluation You understand that production AI systems require rigorous quality and evaluation practices beyond model selection and prompting. You have experience establishing offline and online evaluation strategies for LLM-powered systems, covering retrieval and response quality, factual grounding, task completion, reliability, latency and cost. You can build evaluation harnesses and regression tests with representative datasets, metrics and quality thresholds, and integrate them into CI/CD as deployment and quality gates. You can use evaluation, observability and tracing to diagnose quality issues across data, retrieval, context, prompts, models and orchestration, and drive systematic improvements. Engineering Leadership You can translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical architectures and incrementally deliver solutions from experimentation through production. You make architecture decisions based on measurable trade-offs rather than technology trends and are comfortable challenging unnecessary complexity. You can lead POCs and technical experiments while clearly distinguishing between what demonstrates feasibility and what is required to operate the capability reliably at enterprise scale. You have proven technical leadership capabilities and the ability to influence engineers, product leaders and cross-functional stakeholders. You enjoy mentoring engineers and raising the technical capabilities of the broader engineering team. You collaborate effectively with Product and domain experts and can communicate complex architecture decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. You stay current with evolving engineering and AI technologies through formal training and self-directed learning, while applying new technologies pragmatically. You have experience working within CI/CD and Dev Ops environments and understand production engineering practices including monitoring, observability, resilience, security and operational readiness. Useful Links: Life at Target: https://india.target.com/ Benefits: https://india.target.com/life-at-target/workplace/benefits Culture: https://india.target.com/life-at-target/belonging Target is one of the world’s most recognized brands and one of America’s leading retailers. We make Target our guests’ preferred shopping destination by offering outstanding value, inspiration, innovation and an exceptional guest experience that no other retailer can deliver. Target is committed to responsible corporate citizenship, ethical business practices, environmental stewardship and generous community support. Since 1946, we have given 5 percent of our profits back to our communities. Our goal is to work as one team to fulfill our unique brand promise to our guests, wherever and whenever they choose to shop. We'll contact you if you're selected for next steps. In the meantime, follow us at A Bullseye View for the latest news. Our Benefits We care about and invest 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.