Principal Engineer - Data Engineering

About Target: As a Fortune 50 company with more than 350,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers.​ Working at Target means the opportunity to help all families discover the joy of everyday life. Caring for our communities is woven into who we are, and we invest in the places we collectively live, work and play. We prioritize relationships, fuel and develop talent by creating growth opportunities, and succeed as one Target team. At our core, our purpose is ingrained in who we are, what we value, and how we work. It’s how we care, grow, and win together.   

  
About Target Tech: 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.

Join our global in-house technology team of more than 4,000 of engineers, data scientists, architects, coaches and product managers striving 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 Team: This role is part of the Data Engineering team at Target Tech. Our mission is to build a best-in-class retail data platform for Target, enabling analytics, machine learning, and science models. We continually innovate across storage, computing platforms, and data structures to provide customized data-as-a-service solutions.

As a Principal Engineer you set the strategy for retail data platform and/or software/infrastructure engineering at Target. You set the direction for how data products, software and infrastructure engineering efforts will be designed, developed, and operationalised across multiple portfolios and drives adoption across Target Tech. You lead and approve engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements. You are a thought leader and mentor for internal and external technical talent and actively contribute to the external technical community. 

Key Responsibilities:

As a Principal Engineer for the data engineering, you will: 

• Influence and contribute to engineering initiatives and practices at the enterprise (Target Tech) level
• Optimize data platform performance, provide expertise on choosing right tools, technologies and lead architecture of automated, scalable, resilient and self-healing data platform.
• Explore ways to enhance quality, reliability and ensure excellence in the end-to-end delivery of complex engineering solutions
• Collaborate with other engineers across products and data scientists to continually improve the development standards and practices at data engineering and larger Target Tech
• Be a thought leader and mentor for internal and external technical talent and actively contribute to the external technical community
• 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.
• Work closely with our product, UX, platform and data teams to implement an intuitive, coherent, and engaging user experience
• Manage complex cross-team coordination and dependencies 
• Ensure high quality, stable, and performant code
• Perform code and design reviews that guarantee code quality
• Evaluate and communicate different engineering solutions and trade-offs 
• Develop clean, well-tested code to deliver functionality that meets business objectives 
• Identify long-term tech opportunities that bring value and develop a roadmap
  for future work to ensure continued product health and innovation 
• Identify opportunities to perform or lead POC/POT with our teams 

About you:

• 4-year degree or equivalent.
• 15+ years of experience in technology development or services, including deep expertise in data modelling, pipeline development, with a focus on Spark, Scala, Python/Java and associated libraries and frameworks.
• 4+ years of experience in strategic planning and setting technical direction. 
• Deep understanding of data architecture patterns, data governance, best practices, testing and performance optimization techniques.
• Expertise in open source technologies like Hadoop, public Cloud platforms, database fundamentals, dev ops practises and performance tuning
• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers, providing technical guidance and fostering a collaborative and innovative environment.
• Drive the technical roadmap for the data platform, making strategic decisions to enhance performance, maintainability, and scalability.
• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to ensure code quality, maintainability, and adherence to coding standards.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest data technologies, tools, and trends, and evaluate their potential application within the organization.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify and address technical challenges and optimize development processes.
• Actively participate in architectural discussions, providing valuable insights and advocating for best practices.
• Lead by example, demonstrating a strong work ethic, excellent problem-solving skills, and a commitment to continuous learning.