Principal Engineer, Observability Platform (Hybrid)

Target; Brooklyn Park (MN); Hybrid; USD 168,000 - 303,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401(k)

Paid time off

Employee discount

Job summary

Target is seeking a Principal Engineer on the Observability team to lead the technical vision for a unified, intelligent reliability platform across Target Tech. You will guide architecture and standards, partnering with senior managers to drive adoption and high-impact improvements.

In this role, you will tackle complex distributed systems, mentor engineers, and shape platform as a product with strong developer experience and self-service capabilities, enabling thousands of engineers to rely on

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture of the observability platform (metrics, logs, traces, alerting, SLOs, system maps).
• Tackle hardest distributed-systems and high-volume telemetry-pipeline challenges.
• Drive observability as an internal product with self-service adoption and instrumented developer workflows.
• Set engineering standards and lead architecture reviews across teams.
• Contribute to infrastructure-wide priorities beyond Observability.
• Represent Observability in enterprise architecture forums and align with Target Tech strategy.

Skills

Technical depth

Technical leadership

Platform / product

Education

4 year degree or equivalent

Tools

OpenTelemetry

ClickHouse

InfluxDB

Kafka

Kubernetes

Grafana

Job description

Target is seeking a Principal Engineer on the Observability team to lead the technical vision for a unified, intelligent reliability platform across Target Tech. You will guide architecture and standards, partnering with senior managers to drive adoption and high-impact improvements.

In this role, you will tackle complex distributed systems, mentor engineers, and shape platform as a product with strong developer experience and self-service capabilities, enabling thousands of engineers to rely on