Sr Engineer - Observability

The pay range is $95,000.00 - $171,000.00

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 well-being and beyond at .

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 () .

Join our Observability team, a dynamic group that provides the vital telemetry pipeline and monitoring tools for all of our engineering teams. We operate at an immense scale – for example, our platform handles on the order of 431 billion metrics and 93 billion log events every day, storing about 500 TB of data daily. We’re not just consumers but active contributors to open-source projects like OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and ClickHouse, reflecting our commitment to innovation in the observability space.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will help drive the technical direction and implementation of our observability platform. This platform is critical for ensuring all services across a hybrid cloud environment are highly observable, reliable, and performant. In this role, you will design and build new capabilities (for example, a scalable alert notification system, or an SRE agent) that help developers learn of issues before guests do and contribute to the team in making key technical decisions to continuously improve system visibility and resiliency. The ideal candidate is proficient in Golang (our primary language) as well as adept with modern infrastructure and cloud technologies. You should have experience building large-scale distributed systems, caching and performance optimization, and deploying services on Kubernetes. We value engineers who are self-driven and exhibit ownership of their work – taking initiative, tackling complex problems with courage, and seeing solutions through design to production. If you are excited by the prospect of working with massive data streams, empowering thousands of developers, and fostering a culture of engineering excellence, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

Build and evolve Target’s observability platform, delivering scalable, high-performance, and reliable telemetry services that power the entire engineering ecosystem.

Write, maintain, and improve code primarily in Go, while also working across multiple languages and frameworks from backend services to frontend tooling demonstrating flexibility and a desire to learn new technologies as needed.

Deploy, manage, and tune containerized applications on our Kubernetes-based platform and VMs to achieve optimal performance and resiliency.

Ensure quality and coding standards are met, perform code and design reviews, and participate in complex debugging and design decisions. Mentor junior engineers by sharing knowledge and best practices, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and learning.

Collaborate closely with software development teams, and product owners to understand observability needs and ensure our solutions meet the broader organization’s requirements. Support our customer teams in implementing mature observability solutions.

Help define and bring our observability strategy and roadmap to life. This means staying up to date with industry trends and new tools, evaluating how they can fit our needs (or how we can improve them), and guiding the adoption of standards like OpenTelemetry for consistent instrumentation.

Ensure our observability systems are secure, compliant, and robust. Automate routine tasks and implement self-healing where possible.

Participate in an on-call rotation responding to incidents and maintaining operational performance to meet our product SLOs.

Foster an inclusive environment where all team members feel valued and empowered to contribute.

Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs.

About you :

• 4 year degree or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of software development experience
• Demonstrates strong domain-specific knowledge regarding Target’s technology capabilities, and key competitors’ products and differentiating features
• Working knowledge on package-specific configuration and deployment along with ability to build custom solutions
• Designs new testing methods and resolves routine and non-routine technical issues with minimal assistance
• Demonstrates strong proficiency in core development platforms within own domain
• Builds strong commitment within the team to support the appropriate team priorities
• Clearly communicates Agile concepts to partners within product team
• Demonstrates a solid understanding of the impact of own work on the team and / or guests
• Writes and organizes code using multiple computer languages, including distributed programming and understand different frameworks and paradigm
• Delivers high-performance, scalable, repeatable, and secure deliverables with broad impact (high throughput and low latency)
• Influences and applies data standards, policies, and procedures
• Maintains technical knowledge within areas of expertise
• Stays current with new and evolving technologies via formal training and self-directed education

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

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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.