Senior AI Engineer – Apply For CircleCard

Target; Brooklyn Park (MN); Hybrid; USD 98,000 - 176,000; Full time

Job summary

Target is seeking a Senior AI Engineer in Minnesota (CircleCard domain) to design and implement AI-powered backend services. You will own parts of the Circle Card architecture, guide engineers, and ensure robust, scalable production systems.

You will collaborate with AI platforms and data teams to deliver intelligent features for guests and merchants. The role emphasizes strong Python/Kotlin/Java skills, microservice design, and adherence to responsible AI practices, with hybrid onsite/online

Qualifications

• 4 years of degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience building enterprise-scale applications and backend systems.
• Hands-on experience designing and deploying production AI applications, AI-powered tools or agentic systems using modern large language models.
• Experience building autonomous or multi-agent workflows using orchestration frameworks.
• Strong understanding of AI application architecture, including prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, tool calling, memory management, orchestration patterns and AI evaluation.
• Experience optimizing AI applications for quality, latency, token efficiency and inference cost while implementing responsible AI, governance and observability practices.
• Proficiency in Python for AI application development, automation or AI tooling.
• Expert-level proficiency in Kotlin and Java, with experience building microservices using Micronaut and/or Spring Boot.
• Experience building highly available, resilient, secure and observable production services.
• Strong communication, collaboration and technical leadership skills.

Responsibilities

• Leverage AI-enabled development tools to design, implement, test, and review AI-powered software solutions.
• Collaborate with AI platforms to improve engineering productivity while upholding code quality and security standards.
• Validate AI-generated code and recommendations through testing and peer reviews.
• Design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems to solve engineering and business problems.
• Lead design discussions, architecture reviews, and implementation planning with engineering teams.
• Develop AI agents and multi-agent workflows to automate processes and enhance experiences.
• Ensure observability and performance of AI services across production systems.

Skills

Python for AI development

Leadership and mentoring

AI architecture design

Problem-solving

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

Python

Kotlin

Java

Micronaut

Spring Boot

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Redis

Docker

Kubernetes

LangChain

Job description

What You'll Do

The pay range is 98,000.00 - 176,000.00. 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 wellbeing and beyond at https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.

Senior AI Engineer – Apply For CircleCard

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.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Engineer, you serve as a specialist in the engineering team that supports the product. You help develop and gain insight into the application architecture. You can distill an abstract architecture into concrete design and influence implementation. You show expertise in applying the appropriate software engineering patterns to build robust and scalable systems. You are an expert in programming and apply your skills in developing the product. You have the skills to design and implement the architecture on your own but choose to influence your fellow engineers by proposing software designs, providing feedback on software designs and/or implementation. You show good problem‑solving skills and can help the team in triaging operational issues. You leverage your expertise in eliminating repeat occurrences.

The team is responsible for creating a seamless and efficient Circle Card application experience for our guests. Our primary goal is to deliver an instant approve or decline decision while increasing the number of successful Circle Card applications. Beyond application processing, we support in‑store balance paydowns for Guest Circle Cards and maintain internal tracking of key Circle Card metrics. We own core backend systems powering the Circle Card journey with front‑end experience in store registry. This breadth allows us to maintain a holistic view and innovate effectively across the guest experience.

AI Engineering

• Leverage AI‑assisted software development tools throughout the software development lifecycle, including solution design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and code reviews.
• Collaborate effectively with AI coding assistants and enterprise AI platforms to improve engineering productivity while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, architecture, and maintainability.
• Apply sound engineering judgment to validate AI‑generated code and technical recommendations through testing, peer reviews, and established software engineering practices.
• Design and build production AI‑powered applications using Target-approved AI platforms, frameworks and large language models to solve engineering and business problems.
• Design, build, and deploy production‑grade autonomous and agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool orchestration, memory management, and multi‑step workflow execution.
• Develop domain‑specific AI agents and multi‑agent workflows using modern orchestration frameworks to automate engineering processes and enhance retail and enterprise experiences.
• Design and implement prompt engineering and context engineering strategies to improve application quality, reliability, and relevance.
• Build retrieval‑augmented generation solutions leveraging enterprise knowledge sources, vector search technologies and semantic retrieval.
• Optimize AI applications for response quality, latency, throughput, token utilization and inference cost.
• Implement AI evaluation frameworks and apply responsible AI, security, privacy, governance and observability best practices.
• Build reusable AI components, frameworks, libraries, workflows and engineering accelerators that improve developer productivity.
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities, lead proof‑of‑concept initiatives and recommend adoption strategies that deliver measurable business value.
• Partner across engineering teams to integrate AI capabilities into products, platforms and software development workflows.

Services Engineering

• Design, develop and maintain highly scalable AI‑ready services using Kotlin, Java and Micronaut.
• Build secure, high‑performance RESTful APIs and event‑driven services supporting high‑volume retail and financial workloads.
• Design distributed systems using Kafka, asynchronous messaging, distributed caching and cloud‑native architecture patterns.
• Design and optimize PostgreSQL databases, including data modeling, indexing, query optimization and transactional integrity.
• Build resilient, highly available services with strong fault tolerance, scalability and operational excellence.
• Lead technical design discussions, architecture reviews, code reviews and implementation planning.
• Improve platform observability using OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging and production monitoring.
• Continuously improve application performance, scalability, resiliency, observability and operational health.
• Partner closely with Product Management, UX, Architecture, Infrastructure, Data and business stakeholders to deliver customer‑focused solutions.

About You

Required Qualifications

• 4 years of degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience building enterprise‑scale applications and backend systems.

AI Engineering

• Hands‑on experience designing and deploying production AI applications, AI‑powered tools or agentic systems using modern large language models.
• Experience building autonomous or multi‑agent workflows using technologies such as Model Context Protocol, LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, Google ADK, Semantic Kernel or equivalent orchestration frameworks.
• Strong understanding of AI application architecture, including prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation, tool calling, memory management, orchestration patterns and AI evaluation.
• Experience optimizing AI applications for quality, latency, token efficiency and inference cost while implementing responsible AI, governance and observability practices.
• Proficiency in Python for AI application development, automation or AI tooling.

Services Engineering

• Expert‑level proficiency in Kotlin and Java, with experience building microservices using Micronaut and/or Spring Boot.
• Strong experience designing distributed systems, RESTful APIs, Kafka‑based event‑driven architectures, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience building highly available, resilient, secure and observable production services.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Strong communication, collaboration and technical leadership skills with experience mentoring engineers, leading design discussions and driving engineering best practices.
• Passion for applying emerging AI technologies to solve complex engineering and business challenges.

Extra Points If You Have

• Worked with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal.
• Experience creating reusable AI workflows or skills to enable efficient, repeatable engineering tasks.
• Worked on Target Register platform.

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

Please paste this url into your preferred browser to learn about benefits eligibility for this role: https://tgt.biz/BenefitsForYou_D

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 [e-mail]. Non‑accommodation‑related requests, such as application follow‑ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.