Level

Target

Lead Full Stack Engineer - AI Platform Team

Target is hiring a Lead Full Stack Engineer - AI Platform Team. It pays $132k-$238k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Target.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include RAG, AI agents and AI safety.
  • Level classifies it as a lead role.
  • Level lists 1,600+ other open roles at Target.

AI in this role

ragai-agentsai-safety
The pay range is $132,000.00 - $238,000.00

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 https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits.

JOIN TARGET AS A LEAD FULL STACK ENGINEER – AI DATA PLATFORM TEAM

 

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.

 

About the role

As a Lead Engineer on the AI/ML and Agent Platform team, you will provide technical leadership and design and build enterprise-grade full-stack capabilities for agent development, orchestration, evaluation, observability, sandboxing, and production execution. You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, platform engineering, GenAI, and modern application development to create scalable and intuitive agentic experiences.

 

Key Responsibilities:

·       Lead the architecture and development of scalable full-stack solutions for agent orchestration, execution, evaluation, and monitoring

·       Build reusable capabilities for agent lifecycle management, context and memory, tool integration, model and prompt configuration, secure sandbox execution, and workflow orchestration

·       Develop intuitive experiences for building, testing, orchestrating, and managing AI agents and workflows

·       Integrate LLMs, AI agents, enterprise tools, and external systems into reliable production-grade solutions with appropriate guardrails

·       Build APIs, SDKs, platform services, and developer tools that enable teams to create, test, deploy, and operate intelligent agents

·       Develop evaluation and observability capabilities including testing, quality metrics, tracing, monitoring, dashboards, and debugging

·       Ensure solutions meet enterprise standards for security, governance, privacy, reliability, and auditability

·       Partner with Product, UX, Data Science, Architecture, and engineering teams to define and deliver platform capabilities

·       Drive scalability, resiliency, performance, and cost efficiency across cloud-native systems

·       Provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and establish engineering standards for AI/ML and agentic systems

 

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

 

About you:

  • 4-year degree or equivalent experience
  • 7+ years of full stack software engineering experience including technical leadership of complex systems and initiatives
  • Strong programming skills in Java, Kotlin, Go, or Python
  • Strong experience building end-to-end applications across backend services/APIs and modern frontend technologies such as React and TypeScript
  • Experience building production AI/ML or GenAI applications using LLMs, agents, or agentic workflows
  • Strong experience designing scalable distributed systems, APIs, and microservices architectures
  • Deep understanding of system design, scalability, reliability, security, and observability
  • Experience with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud-native development
  • Experience with agent orchestration, tool calling, prompt management, context management, memory, and multi-agent systems
  • Experience building evaluation frameworks for LLMs or AI agents
  • Experience with secure sandboxing or isolated execution environments for AI agents
  • Knowledge of AI tracing, observability, monitoring, and debugging
  • Experience with RAG, vector databases, semantic search, embeddings, or model gateways
  • Experience developing platform APIs, SDKs, or reusable developer tooling
  • Understanding of Responsible AI, governance, guardrails, security, and privacy
  • Experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure cloud
  • Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and influence architecture across teams
  • Self-driven and results-oriented, with strong ownership, sound judgment, and the ability to move quickly while maintaining high technical standards
  • Collaborative team player with a commitment to continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and building reliable AI-powered applications that create business value

 

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_E

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.  

Application deadline is : 11/19/2026

How we rate this

Lead Full Stack Engineer - AI Platform Team at Target rates 96 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

RAGAI agentsAI Safety

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$132k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 21% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
  2. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  3. How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
  4. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  5. Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, AI agents, and AI Safety. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

Want an expert to read your CV for this job?

Free. Send your CV and the role you want next. We reply by email within 2 to 4 business days.

Get new software engineer jobs (Builds AI ●●●●) by email

One email a week with the new software engineer jobs (Builds AI ●●●●), each rated for how much AI is in the work. No recruiter spam, unsubscribe in one click.

Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click.

Similar roles

Software Engineering roles that build AI, at other companies.

What kind of AI work fits you?

Answer 12 practical questions in about three minutes. Get a simple profile, the work it points to, and live roles to explore next.

Find my next step

More jobs at Target

More software engineer jobs

Related searches

Same AI level