Senior Backend Engineer

About Us: 

As a Fortune 50 company with more than 4000,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers.  

Working at Target means the opportunity to help all families discover the joy of everyday life. Caring for our communities is woven into who we are, and we invest in the places we collectively live, work and play. We prioritize relationships, fuel and develop talent by creating growth opportunities, and succeed as one Target team. At our core, our purpose is ingrained in who we are, what we value, and how we work. It’s how we care, grow, and win together.    

Position Overview 

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with strong experience in distributed systems and Java-based applications to join our team. 

In this role, you will design, build, and operate scalable backend services, contribute to architecture decisions, and own services end-to-end in production. You will work closely with cross-functional partners to deliver reliable, high-performance systems. 

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

Responsibilities: 

• Design and build high-quality, scalable, and resilient backend services using Java and Spring Boot 

• Lead system design and architecture discussions, making informed trade-offs across performance, scalability, and reliability 

• Own services end-to-end in production, ensuring availability, latency, and SLA adherence 

• Drive best practices for distributed systems design, fault tolerance, and observability 

• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code, and set a high bar for engineering quality 

• Conduct code reviews and mentor engineers, improving overall team capability 

• Troubleshoot complex production issues, lead root cause analysis, and implement durable fixes 

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, UX, and platform teams to deliver solutions end-to-end 

• Partner with DevOps to enhance CI/CD pipelines and optimize Kubernetes-based deployments 

• Contribute to architecture governance, documenting designs, trade-offs, and operational runbooks 

• Influence technical direction by evaluating tools, technologies, and system improvements 

• Contribute to building next-generation platform capabilities leveraging agent-based and AI-driven orchestration systems 

About You: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience 

• 5+ years of professional software development experience 

• Strong proficiency in Java and deep experience with Spring Boot 

• Proven experience building microservices and RESTful APIs 

• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles: scalability, reliability, consistency, and fault tolerance 

• Hands-on experience with messaging systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) 

• Experience with cloud-native environments (Docker, Kubernetes) 

• Strong database fundamentals across relational (MySQL/Postgres) and NoSQL (MongoDB/Redis) systems 

• Experience with modern engineering practices: Git, CI/CD, automated testing, and observability tools 

• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to drive solutions in ambiguous environments 

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence technical decisions 

• Proven track record of delivering reliable, scalable systems in production 

Nice to have 

• Experience with event-driven architectures or streaming systems 

• Exposure to high-scale, low-latency systems 

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform) 

• Experience with performance tuning and system optimization 

• Familiarity with AI-assisted developer tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT) 

• Familiarity with agentic platforms and AI-driven application architectures, including concepts like orchestration of autonomous agents, tool usage, and workflow-based systems