Principal Engineer - Observability

Pay is based on several factors which vary based on position. These include labor markets and in some instances may include education, work experience and certifications. In addition to your pay, Target cares about and invests 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.

About us:

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. We bring that vision to life through our values and culture. Learn more about Target here.

Technology is one of Target’s top four enterprise priorities. It plays an outsized role in powering growth, speed, reliability, and innovation across the company. From merchandising and supply chain to stores and digital, our technology platforms directly enable the most critical outcomes for 2026 and beyond.

Target Tech builds and operates the intelligence powered architecture that fuels these outcomes. Our teams design scalable platforms, modern data ecosystems, and resilient infrastructure that allow thousands of engineers to deliver secure, high performing systems at enterprise scale.

About the Observability Team

Reliability is foundational to delivering on Target’s purpose. Every register scan, Drive Up order, search result, inventory update, and fulfillment workflow depends on systems that are resilient, measurable, and continuously improving.

The Observability team builds and operates the enterprise platform that enables engineering teams to understand, measure, and improve the reliability and performance of their products. We provide standardized telemetry, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, system maps, and operational insights across more than 20,000 services. Our platform enables:

• Enterprise-scale metrics, logs, and traces built on OpenTelemetry standards
• Real-time system maps and dependency graphs across complex service ecosystems
• SLO management, error budget tracking, and reliability showback
• Integrated alerting, on-call alignment, and actionable operational insights
• AI-driven root cause analysis and automated remediation capabilities

We operate at massive scale in 24x7 production environments. Technologies commonly used across the team include Golang, Kubernetes, Kafka, ClickHouse, InfluxDB, Grafana, React, and distributed systems patterns that support high-volume telemetry pipelines. We are moving beyond traditional monitoring: our ambition is an intelligent, agent-enabled observability platform that proactively detects degradation, explains system behavior, and recommends or executes recovery actions before guests are impacted.

About the Role

As a Principal Engineer, you are the senior-most individual-contributor technical leader on the Observability team. You partner closely with three Senior Engineering Managers and product leadership to set the technical vision, architecture, and standards for a unified, intelligent reliability platform serving all of Target Tech. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you lead through depth, design, and influence rather than through direct reports.

Principal Engineers operate at the overall Infrastructure level. While you are assigned to a domain — in this case Observability — you are expected to contribute meaningfully to broader Infrastructure priorities, including initiatives and problems that lie outside your assigned team. Your expertise is applied wherever it moves the wider organization forward.

You will be accountable for:

• Technical direction. Owning the end-to-end architecture of the observability platform — metrics, logs, traces, alerting, SLOs, system maps, and AI-driven root cause analysis — across teams and roadmaps.
• The hardest problems. Solving the distributed-systems and high-volume telemetry-pipeline challenges where vendor defaults break down at Target scale and no standard playbook exists.
• Platform as a product. Driving observability as an internal product with first-class developer experience, self-service adoption, and “observable by default” instrumentation embedded directly in developer workflows.
• Engineering standards. Setting technical standards, leading design and architecture reviews, and multiplying the effectiveness of engineers across all three teams.
• Infrastructure impact. Contributing to Infrastructure-wide technical priorities beyond Observability, applying your judgment and expertise to problems that span teams and domains.
• Enterprise influence. Representing Observability in cross-domain and enterprise architecture forums, and aligning the platform’s direction with the broader Target Tech strategy.

Success in this role requires exceptional technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity and consensus in ambiguous, high-scale environments.

What We’re Looking For

This role is defined by three pillars. We expect a Principal Engineer to be outstanding across all three:

Technical Depth. Deep, current expertise in distributed systems and high-volume telemetry pipelines — OpenTelemetry internals, columnar and time-series storage and query engines (e.g., ClickHouse, InfluxDB), streaming with Kafka, and performance, cost, and reliability engineering at scale. You can go deep enough to debug the pipeline and broad enough to shape the platform.

Technical Leadership. Proven ability to influence across an organization without direct authority — setting standards, driving architectural consensus, and mentoring senior engineers. You raise the technical bar of everyone around you and bring clarity to ambiguous, contested problem spaces.

Platform / Product. A product mindset toward internal platforms. You measure success by adoption and developer experience, not just capability — designing self-service, reducing friction, and making reliability and instrumentation the path of least resistance for thousands of engineers.

Why This Role Is Compelling

This role sits at the center of one of Target’s top enterprise priorities. You will directly shape how reliability, performance, and operational intelligence are delivered across the company. You will:

• Influence how thousands of engineers build and operate software
• Shape the evolution from reactive monitoring to AI-assisted and autonomous reliability
• Protect revenue, brand trust, and guest experience through resilient platform design
• Solve distributed systems challenges at enterprise retail scale that are not in any playbook
• Play a visible, senior role in advancing Target’s intelligence-powered architecture

If you are motivated by scale, impact, and deep technical challenges, this role offers all three.

What Success Looks Like

Within 12 to 18 months, you will have:

• Ratified a clear platform architecture and technical roadmap adopted across the three engineering teams
• Delivered measurable improvements in telemetry-pipeline scale, cost efficiency, and query latency
• Raised standard-telemetry adoption and “observable by default” developer experience across production TAP applications
• Reduced mean time to detect and mean time to engage during critical incidents through better platform capabilities
• Strengthened the senior engineering bench through design leadership, mentorship, and durable technical standards
• Made a visible, meaningful contribution to at least one Infrastructure-wide priority beyond Observability, applying your expertise across teams and domains

About You

You are a technical leader who leads through depth and influence. You are energized by architecture, telemetry design, distributed systems, and failure analysis — and equally by helping other engineers grow in scope and impact. Desired experience includes:

Building and operating large-scale telemetry or data-intensive distributed systems

• 4 year degree or equivalent experience. Continuing education to maintain thorough knowledge of technical domains along with staying current in latest technologies 
• 12+ years of experience in technology development or services 
• 4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction
• Supporting and operating 24x7 business-critical capabilities
• Instrumenting products with metrics, logs, and traces to make them observable by default
• Designing and deploying scalable APIs and microservices
• Working with streaming and columnar/time-series data stores (e.g., Kafka, ClickHouse, InfluxDB)
• Depth in one or more platform languages such as Golang, and orchestration with Kubernetes
• Using version control (Git) and working in Linux/Unix-based environments
• Communicating complex technical solutions clearly across diverse technical and non-technical audiences
• Working effectively across multiple teams in a product-oriented environment
• Experience in Java/ J2EE, sql/ no-sql (postgre, mongoDB, Cassandra, graph structure, etc.), Python, Ruby, Chef, Drone, Kubernetes containers, Cloud tech, etc.

Minimum Qualifications

• In-depth knowledge of system design, build, test, and operational debugging practices
• Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering production distributed systems at scale
• A track record of sustained technical influence and standard-setting across multiple engineering teams
• Commitment to continuous learning and staying current with evolving technologies

Join Us

If you want to set technical direction at enterprise scale, build intelligent reliability systems, and shape how one of the largest retailers in the world operates its technology platform, this is your opportunity.

Come build the systems that help millions of guests discover the joy of everyday life.

This position will operate as a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Target’s needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team member’s core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned to and virtually, depending upon what your role, team and tasks require for that day. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Click here if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.

Benefits Eligibility

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

In compliance with state and federal laws, Target will make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please reach out to candidate.accommodations@HRHelp.Target.com.Non-accommodation-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.