Description
As a Senior Engineer – AI Platforms, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), you will be part of a team focused on accelerating the adoption of Target's enterprise AI platforms by working directly with engineering and product teams to solve complex, high-value AI problems.
You will operate at the intersection of AI engineering, platform engineering, and product development, bringing deep technical expertise directly to teams building AI-powered experiences.
Responsibilities:
- Partner directly with engineering and product teams to design, build, and productionize AI-powered applications and experiences using Target's enterprise AI platform.
- Develop production-grade solutions using generative AI, LLMs, agentic architectures, enterprise context and retrieval, model APIs, tools, and platform services.
- Rapidly understand ambiguous business and engineering problems, translate them into technical designs, and build working solutions that demonstrate measurable value.
- Lead technical implementation across the lifecycle,from exploration and prototyping through architecture, development, evaluation, deployment, observability, and production operations.
- Apply strong software engineering and distributed systems principles to ensure AI solutions are scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, and production-ready.
- Work closely with AI Platform teams to integrate existing platform capabilities and identify gaps encountered while building real-world applications.
- Identify patterns across FDE engagements and help convert repeatable solutions into reusable platform capabilities, APIs, SDKs, libraries, frameworks, templates, and reference architectures.
- Improve the AI builder experience by reducing friction across development, experimentation, testing, evaluation, debugging, deployment, and production operations.
- Build reference implementations and examples that demonstrate effective patterns for adopting enterprise AI capabilities.
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, models, and developer tooling through research and proof-of-concept activities and recommend appropriate approaches based on scalability, maintainability, security, and cost.
- Lead code reviews, design reviews, testing, debugging, and architecture discussions while maintaining high engineering quality and operational standards.
- Diagnose complex production and integration issues, identify systemic causes, and develop solutions that prevent repeat occurrences.
- Collaborate across platform engineering, application engineering, product, architecture, data science, and other teams to deliver solutions spanning organizational and technical boundaries.
- Share technical learnings, patterns, and best practices from FDE engagements with the broader engineering community and help other engineers successfully adopt them.
Requirements:
- 4-year degree or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of software development experience with strong hands-on engineering and programming skills.
- Strong experience designing, building, testing, deploying, and operating production-grade applications, services, or distributed systems.
- Experience building AI-enabled applications and working with technologies such as LLMs, model APIs, agentic frameworks, retrieval/context patterns, tool integration, or other modern AI capabilities.
- Strong proficiency in one or more modern programming languages, with experience developing services and applications using modern frameworks and engineering practices.
- Experience designing and consuming APIs, SDKs, libraries, frameworks, or platform capabilities.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, APIs, scalability, reliability, performance, security, and production operations.
- Experience with cloud-native development, containers, orchestration, CI/CD, observability, testing, debugging, and operational monitoring.
- Ability to take ambiguous requirements, rapidly understand the problem space, and translate them into concrete technical designs and working software.
- Ability to work across the full engineering lifecycle,from rapid prototyping and experimentation to hardened production systems.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs and balance speed of delivery with scalability, maintainability, operational excellence, and long-term platform needs.
- Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to diagnose complex technical and operational issues and eliminate repeat occurrences.
- Experience collaborating directly with product teams and engineers and working effectively across organizational and technical boundaries.
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and influence design and implementation decisions through technical expertise.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, provide technical guidance, and raise engineering standards within a team.
- Maintains technical knowledge within areas of expertise and stays current with rapidly evolving AI and software engineering technologies through formal training and self-directed learning.