Principal Engineer - AI Platform (Forward Deployed Engineering and AI Builder Experience)(Remote Or Hybrid)

The pay range is $168,000.00 - $356,000.00

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 PRINCIPAL ENGINEER –AI PLATFORMS, FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEERING and AI BUILDER EXPERIENCE

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.

A role with Target’s AI Platform organization means the opportunity to build and evolve the foundational capabilities that enable teams across Target to develop, deploy, and operate AI-powered products and experiences at enterprise scale. Our teams build platforms, frameworks, and developer experiences that make advanced AI technologies accessible, reliable, and scalable for engineers across the organization.

As a Principal Engineer – AI Builder Experience and Forward Deployed Engineering, you will provide technical leadership for how engineering teams across Target build, integrate, deploy, and operate AI-powered applications. You will work at the intersection of AI platform engineering, developer experience, and forward deployed engineering, partnering directly with product and engineering teams to accelerate complex and high-value AI initiatives while shaping reusable capabilities for the broader engineering community.
You will help architect and deliver production-grade AI solutions, including agentic and LLM-powered applications, while establishing scalable patterns for model and agent integration, enterprise context, evaluation, observability, deployment, and production operations. You will bring deep platform expertise directly to engineering teams, helping them navigate complex technical challenges and successfully move AI solutions from experimentation into production.

A critical part of this role is translating real-world implementation experience into improvements to the AI platform. You will identify recurring challenges and patterns across forward deployed engagements and turn those learnings into reusable APIs, SDKs, frameworks, developer tooling, reference architectures, and self-service platform capabilities. Through this feedback loop, you will help reduce bespoke engineering and continuously improve the experience for the next generation of AI builders.

You will also provide technical leadership for the end-to-end AI developer experience, including onboarding, development, experimentation, testing, evaluation, debugging, deployment, and observability. You will partner closely with platform engineering, product, architecture, and application teams to influence platform roadmaps, establish engineering standards, and create reference implementations that enable teams to adopt AI capabilities effectively and responsibly at scale.

Given the pace of change in AI, you will stay current on emerging technologies and engineering approaches, evaluate and recommend new frameworks and tooling, publish learnings and reusable patterns, mentor senior engineers, and influence technical direction across the broader AI engineering ecosystem. We utilize Agile principles, follow best-practice software design, participate in code reviews, and create maintainable, well-tested codebases with relevant documentation.

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

About you:

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or another quantitative discipline or equivalent industry experience
• 8 plus years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale software platforms, developer platforms, AI/ML systems, or distributed…