Lead AI Platform Engineer — LLMs, APIs & MLOps

Target; Brooklyn Park (MN); On-site; USD 132,000 - 238,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401(k)

Paid time off

Employee discount

Job summary

Target is seeking a Lead Engineer in Forward Deployed Engineering to drive enterprise AI platform adoption. You will lead complex engagements, design and productionize AI solutions, and guide architectural decisions across teams.

You will apply distributed systems expertise to improve reliability, security, and performance of production AI systems, while shaping reusable patterns and tooling for broader adoption.

Qualifications

• 4-year degree or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of software development experience with strong hands‑on engineering and programming skills.
• Expertise in software architecture, design, distributed systems, APIs, cloud‑native technologies and modern engineering practices.
• Demonstrated proficiency programming in Java, Python, Koltin, etc.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex technical engagements that accelerate enterprise AI platform adoption, combining solution architecture, hands-on engineering, and technical guidance to help teams move from experimentation to production.
• Design, build, and productionize AI solutions, reference implementations, technical tooling, and platform-support capabilities using LLMs, agentic architectures, enterprise context and retrieval, model APIs, and tool integrations.
• Guide technical design and implementation across engineering efforts, helping teams navigate complex architectural decisions, troubleshoot challenges, and develop scalable, maintainable solutions.
• Apply software engineering and distributed systems expertise to improve the reliability, security, performance, observability, and op readiness of production AI systems.
• Identify recurring implementation challenges, integration gaps, and platform limitations, collaborating with platform engineering to develop reusable patterns, APIs, SDKs, frameworks, and shared capabilities.
• Help establish and improve engineering practices across engagements - including architecture reviews, code quality, testing, evaluation, deployment, and prod ops.
• Collaborate across product, engineering, and platform teams to evaluate technical approaches, share implementation learnings, and improve how teams adopt and use enterprise AI capabilities.

Skills

Java

Python

Koltin

LLMs

agentic architectures

APIs

Education

4-year degree or equivalent experience

Job description

Target is seeking a Lead Engineer in Forward Deployed Engineering to drive enterprise AI platform adoption. You will lead complex engagements, design and productionize AI solutions, and guide architectural decisions across teams.

You will apply distributed systems expertise to improve reliability, security, and performance of production AI systems, while shaping reusable patterns and tooling for broader adoption.