Principal Engineer - Target India

As a Principal Engineer in Target Marketplace Technology, you will set the strategy for software development and infrastructure engineering at Target. You will lead and approve software and infrastructure engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements. Your goal will be to drive adoption and lead foundational architecture work that enables growth in the Marketplace business.

Responsibilities:

• Understand Target's business and technical environments and provide technical leadership in resolving complex business challenges via current technical solutions by assessing viability, applicability, and cost implication through prototypes and POCs.
• Lead the architecture and engineering of sophisticated, production-grade Marketplace capabilities that span organisational and platform boundaries, with a focus on building durable systems that can support materially greater seller, assortment, transaction, and operational scale.
• Shape the modernisation of Marketplace workflows that connect with enterprise capabilities, establishing clear abstractions, resilient contracts, and scalable patterns where existing systems were originally optimised for first-party retail.
• Lead designing and building platform APIs and services with deep focus on non-functional requirements including scalability, availability, performance, resilience, security, and operability, while being a strong advocate of agile and DevOps practices across engineers.
• Apply AI thoughtfully to accelerate engineering outcomes and help establish AI-native approaches where they create meaningful business and technical advantage.
• Collaborate with technical staff, product partners, and Enterprise Architecture teams in setting technical direction across platforms and drive technology lifecycle management and communication of standards/decisions to the engineering team.
• Work with engineering leaders to build a high-performing engineering team and provide technical leadership, coaching, motivation, and participate in the selection of technical talent.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field required; Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field preferred.
• 12+ years of experience in technology development or services, ideally in a product-led technology environment; retail or marketplace experience is strongly preferred.
• 4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction.
• Proven track record of leading significant architecture evolution and raising technical maturity for systems of comparable scale, with demonstrated success navigating both deep technical complexity and cross-organisational dependencies.
• Possesses a strong understanding of distributed systems, platform and API design, data and integration patterns, and the engineering trade-offs required to build resilient, scalable, production-grade software.
• Understands business fundamentals and how technologies can support business goals along with how to translate business vision into a technical strategy while understanding the financial implications.
• Has proven leadership capabilities, the ability to influence others, interpersonal skills, and problem-solving skills, including the ability to align teams and senior stakeholders across organisational boundaries.
• Strong team player who understands concepts of teamwork and team effectiveness.
• Has excellent verbal, written, and presentation communication skills to convey complex technical solutions clearly to an organisation.
• Has excellent planning and organisational skills.
• Deep hands-on engineering experience with modern JVM technologies, including Kotlin with Micronaut and Java with Spring Boot, plus strong experience with SQL/NoSQL data stores, APIs, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud technologies.
• Demonstrated success using AI-enabled engineering practices to accelerate delivery and improve outcomes, along with experience designing or building AI-native systems and capabilities.