Target
Principal Engineer - AI Platform (Forward Deployed Engineering and AI Builder Experience)
$168K–$356K
7000 Target Pkwy N,NCD-0375 Brooklyn Park,MN 55445 +1 · Remote or Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 5, 2026
- Location
- 7000 Target Pkwy N,NCD-0375 Brooklyn Park,MN 55445
100 Mathilda Place,Ste 100 Sunnyvale,CA 94086-6017 - Experience
- 8 plus years designing, building, and operating large-scale software platforms, developer platforms, AI/ML systems, or distributed systems in production environments.
- Education
- MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or another quantitative discipline or equivalent industry experience
About the job
Provides technical leadership for building production AI applications and improving Target’s AI platform and developer experience through reusable capabilities.
What you'll do
- Architect and deliver production-grade LLM-powered and agentic applications, helping teams move AI solutions from experimentation to production.
- Translate implementation challenges into reusable APIs, SDKs, frameworks, tools, reference architectures, and self-service platform capabilities.
- Set technical direction for the AI developer lifecycle, influence platform roadmaps and engineering standards, and mentor senior engineers.
What they ask for
- Strong hands-on software engineering experience and ability to architect and deliver production-grade systems.
- Experience designing and delivering AI applications, including LLM-powered or agentic systems, and understanding model integration, context and retrieval patterns, tool integration, evaluation, and production operations.
- Experience building developer-facing capabilities such as APIs, SDKs, frameworks, libraries, developer tooling, templates, or self-service platform experiences.
- Experience with modern AI engineering and platform technologies, including model APIs, agent development frameworks, evaluation and observability tooling, cloud platforms, containers, orchestration, CI/CD, and operational monitoring.
Pay
$168,000.00 - $356,000.00 USD base salary
Tools
LLM, model APIs, agent development frameworks, cloud platforms, containers, orchestration, CI/CD
AI focus
Build and operate LLM-powered and agentic applications, and develop scalable AI platform capabilities covering model and agent integration, enterprise context, evaluation, observability, deployment, and production operations.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative