Lead Engineer - Gen AI

Role overview

Lead Engineer - Gen AI at Target

You’ll be a proven leader in guiding technical teams and driving products at scale to successful completion.

To succeed in this role, you’ll bring over 7+ years of experience in software design and development, with 5+ years focused on building scalable backend applications.

Your expertise will lie in JVM-based technologies, specifically Java and Kotlin, along with a deep understanding of building robust, scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead Engineer

Required qualifications

• Skills:
• Java & Python (Advanced proficiency in backend, AI, and automation workflows using Java and Python)
• Microservices Architecture (Designing, developing, and managing scalable microservices)
• Spring Boot or Micronaut (Experience with JVM-based frameworks, including reactive programming)
• AI / LLM Integration (Integrating Large Language Models and GenAI features into core applications)
• AI Reliability & Automation (Building agentic frameworks, reducing hallucinations, and improving process automation using OpenAI APIs and SDKs)
• Messaging Systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Databases (Experience with NoSQL databases like Cassandra, MongoDB, and SQL-based databases like PostgreSQL)
• CI/CD (Building and managing pipelines with Jenkins, GitLab, or similar tools)
• Unit and Integration Testing (Spock, JUnit, TestContainers for Java; PyTest, Unittest for Python)
• Cloud Services (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Containerization and Orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Monitoring & Observability (Grafana, ELK Stack, Prometheus)
• Event-Driven Architecture (Knowledge of event-driven patterns in distributed systems)

Preferred qualifications and skills

• Functional Programming (Familiarity with functional programming paradigms in Kotlin)
• GraphQL (Experience designing and integrating GraphQL APIs)
• Legacy System Modernization (Experience refactoring and modernizing older systems)
• Security Best Practices (OWASP, vulnerability scanning, secure coding principles)
• Agile Methodologies (Familiar with Scrum, Kanban, or other agile processes)

Employment details

• Location: Bangalore [India]

About the employer

• As a Fortune 50 company with more than 400,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers.
• At Target, we have a timeless purpose and a proven strategy and that hasn’t happened by accident.
• Some of the best minds from diverse backgrounds come together at Target to redefine retail in an inclusive learning environment that values people and delivers world-class outcomes.
• That winning formula is especially apparent in Bengaluru, where Target in India operates as a fully integrated part of Target’s global team and has more than 4,000 team members supporting the company’s global strategy and operations.
• Target Tech Overview: Every time a guest enters a Target store or browses Target.com , they experience the impact of Target’s investments in technology and innovation.
• We’re the technologists behind one of the most loved retail brands, delivering joy to millions of our guests, team members, and communities.
• Our global in-house technology team of more than 5,000 of engineers, data scientists, architects, coaches and product managers strive to make Target the most convenient, safe and joyful place to shop.
• We use agile practices and leverage open-source software to adapt and build best-in-class technology for our team members and guests—and we do so with a focus on diversity and inclusion, experimentation and continuous learning.
• About Pyramid: Merchandising is a Portfolio within Target – Product Engineering provide reliable data that is core to our enterprise retail operations, including foundational data and aggregation services at scale for retail and commerce platforms.
• We deal with data around Pricing, Promotions, Item, Supplier, Owned Brand, Merch Planning, Space Presentation & Transitions(SPT) & Intelligence Automation.
• As a lead engineer you would be responsible for
• Designing scalable architecture with the best choice of tech, responsible for all the services/functionalities that the team develops while ensuring quality of the team's code and/or infrastructure standards.
• Hands-on development, often taking on the more complicated tasks.
• Ensures solution is production ready, deployable, scalable and resilient.
• Planning and delivering of work in the team in addition to their own work.
• Promotes a learning culture through mentoring and coaching.
• Ensures product observability is in place for reliability.
• Fosters a culture of observability across teams and helps use operational data to improve stability and performance of their domains.
• Drives monitoring work on their team based on the organization's monitoring philosophy.
• Is aware of the operational data for their team’s domain and uses it as a basis for driving changes to the team's services to achieve stability and performance improvements.
• Responsible for ensuring the security of the product and fostering a security first mindset across teams.
• Highly skilled with applying and implementing security concepts such as identifying vulnerabilities in software, creating logic to detect malicious behavior, and analyzing network or host artifacts.
• Integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and GenAI -powered features into core applications.
• Build robust systems that mitigate hallucinations and improve AI reliability.
• Experience building agentic frameworks and AI-driven automation for process enhancement