Lead Engineer - Cloud Security

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life.

As a Lead Engineer on the Cloud Security team, you'll be the senior software developer building and owning the services that turn Target's cloud security signal into action.

Expect to:

• Serve as the senior software engineering lead and hands-on owner of the Cloud Security team's software portfolio , setting the technical direction, standards, and roadmap that other software engineers execute against.
• Lead the design, development, and operation of the finding pipeline: services that ingest cloud security signal from CSPM/CNAPP, IaC scanning, admission control, SSPM, and workload protection; deduplicate and normalize it; enrich it with ownership attribution, severity, and business context; and route it to Target's enterprise remediation and governance workflows with SLAs so product and platform teams can act.
• Design and build scalable backend services in Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot , event-driven where it fits, request/response where it doesn't , with clean APIs, clear data contracts, and the observability needed to run them well in production.
• Own the ownership-attribution problem end-to-end: the data model, the sources of truth, the reconciliation logic, and the feedback loops that keep attribution accurate as Target's cloud footprint evolves.
• Own the noise-reduction problem end-to-end on the software side: deduplication, correlation across sources, suppression logic, and enrichment , so every finding that reaches an engineer is worth their time.
• Build the integrations and data contracts that connect the team's services into Target's enterprise ecosystem: SIEM/SOAR, remediation and governance workflows, ticketing, source control, CI/CD, and internal developer platforms.
• Operate these services as production systems: own their availability, performance, observability, capacity, deploy cadence, and outage response, with clear SLOs and on-call participation.
• Peer closely with the platform engineers on the team who own CSPM/CNAPP, IaC scanning, admission control, and SSPM , you build the software that consumes and acts on what their controls produce, and the API and data contracts between you are a shared design problem.
• Partner with Detection & Response to turn high-signal posture and runtime findings into detections, and to build the software support that cloud incident response needs.
• Drive multi-quarter initiatives end-to-end: from problem framing and scoping, through design, build, rollout, adoption, and steady-state operation.
• Make pragmatic build-vs-buy calls on the software side, and own the technical side of the lifecycle of the libraries, frameworks, and third-party components the team's services depend on.
• Treat the team's software portfolio as a product: invest in automation, self-service, and platform thinking so coverage and remediation scale with Target's cloud footprint.
• Continuously reduce toil for both the team and Target's engineering organization , fewer one-off tickets, more paved roads, better defaults, faster feedback for developers.
• Own the developer experience of the team's APIs and services: clean contracts, clear error messages, documented usage patterns, and a tight feedback loop with the engineers who consume them.
• Establish engineering patterns and standards for the team's software , APIs, event streams, data models, automated testing, observability, resiliency, secure service development, and CI/CD , and raise the bar on all of them.
• Guide database schema evolution, data migrations, cloud-based data warehouse design, API versioning, and backward-compatible platform changes so the team can move fast without breaking its consumers.
• Represent the team's software work clearly to senior leadership and to staff engineers alike: roadmap, risk reduction, operational health, and tradeoffs , in language tuned to the audience.
• Mentor other software engineers on the team on backend engineering, distributed systems, and cloud security software practices, and raise the bar for code quality, testing, code review, on-call hygiene, postmortems, and operational excellence.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools, and apply them responsibly to improve engineering quality and delivery.

About you

• 4-year degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, OR equivalent work experience
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of leading the design and delivery of complex, platform-oriented backend systems
• Deep hands-on experience with Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot, and strong fluency in at least one additional modern language
• Demonstrated experience as a tech lead owning a software capability end-to-end at enterprise scale, including setting technical direction that other engineers execute against
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating distributed, event-driven, and data-intensive backend services in production
• Strong experience designing RESTful APIs, service-to-service integrations, and event streams that other teams depend on
• Experience building and operating findings, event, or telemetry pipelines that aggregate signal from multiple sources, deduplicate and enrich it, and route it to downstream systems with SLAs
• Strong opinions, backed by experience, on how to keep signal-to-noise high in a findings or alert pipeline: deduplication, correlation, suppression discipline, ownership attribution, and SLA-based remediation
• Track record of running production services with clear SLOs, on-call coverage, change management, and continuous-improvement loops
• Experience driving multi-quarter roadmaps end-to-end , from problem framing through rollout, adoption, and steady-state operation , and delivering predictably against them
• Comfortable making and defending pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions, and knowing when to invest in custom engineering vs. lean on an existing capability
• Strong experience with relational databases, cloud-based data warehouses, schema design, data migrations, and data lifecycle considerations for security services; experience with event-streaming technologies such as Kafka or Pub/Sub.
• Hands-on experience with public cloud (GCP preferred; AWS/Azure experience also valued) and with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) at enterprise scale
• Strong understanding of automated testing , unit, integration, contract, regression, and end-to-end , and a demonstrated commitment to shipping code with tests, not around them
• Strong understanding of observability practices and tools for metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and service-level objectives
• Hands-on experience integrating backend services with developer workflows (CI/CD, source control, ticketing) in a way that scales with a large engineering organization
• Strong understanding of secure software development practices and modern cloud-native architectures
• Solid understanding of AI/ML and the emerging engineering considerations associated with it, including the responsible use of AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools such as Claude Code, OpenCode, or Codex
• Strong cross-functional partner: comfortable working closely with a variety of security and product engineering teams to align requirements, rollout plans, and operational ownership
• Effective at representing your work, risks, and tradeoffs to senior leadership, and equally effective explaining the same content to staff engineers in detail
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with strong presentation abilities
• Demonstrated curiosity, bias for action, and a genuine builder's mindset , you want to ship the services, not just describe them