Principal Engineer - Observability

About this role

The pay range is $168,000.00 - $303,000.00 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 .

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 .

Technology is one of Target’s top four enterprise priorities. It plays an outsized role in powering growth, speed, reliability, and innovation across the company. From merchandising and supply chain to stores and digital, our technology platforms directly enable the most critical outcomes for 2026 and beyond.

Target Tech builds and operates the intelligence powered architecture that fuels these outcomes. Our teams design scalable platforms, modern data ecosystems, and resilient infrastructure that allow thousands of engineers to deliver secure, high performing systems at enterprise scale.

About the Observability Team Reliability is foundational to delivering on Target’s purpose. Every register scan, Drive Up order, search result, inventory update, and fulfillment workflow depends on systems that are resilient, measurable, and continuously improving.

The Observability team builds and operates the enterprise platform that enables engineering teams to understand, measure, and improve the reliability and performance of their products. We provide standardized telemetry, logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, system maps, and operational insights across more than 20,000 services. Our platform enables: • Enterprise-scale metrics, logs, and traces built on OpenTelemetry standards • Real-time system maps and dependency graphs across complex service ecosystems • SLO management, error budget tracking, and reliability showback • Integrated alerting, on-call alignment, and actionable operational insights • AI-driven root cause analysis and automated remediation capabilities

We operate at massive scale in 24x7 production environments. Technologies commonly used across the team include Golang, Kubernetes, Kafka, ClickHouse, InfluxDB, Grafana, React, and distributed systems patterns that support high-volume telemetry pipelines. We are moving beyond traditional monitoring: our ambition is an intelligent, agent-enabled observability platform that proactively detects degradation, explains system behavior, and recommends or executes recovery actions before guests are impacted.

About the Role As a Principal Engineer, you are the senior-most individual-contributor technical leader on the Observability team. You partner closely with three Senior Engineering Managers and product leadership to set the technical vision, architecture, and standards for a unified, intelligent reliability platform serving all of Target Tech. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you lead through depth, design, and influence rather than through direct reports.

Principal Engineers operate at the overall Infrastructure level. While you are assigned to a domain — in this case Observability — you are expected to contribute meaningfully to broader Infrastructure priorities, including initiatives and problems that lie outside your assigned team. Your expertise is applied wherever it moves the wider organization forward.

You will be accountable for: • Technical direction. Owning the end-to-end architecture of the observability platform — metrics, logs, traces, alerting, SLOs, system maps, and AI-driven root cause analysis — across teams and roadmaps. • The hardest problems. Solving the distributed-systems and high-volume telemetry-pipeline challenges where vendor defaults break down at Target scale and no standard playbook exists. • Platform as a product. Driving observability as an internal product with first-class developer experience, self-service adoption, and “observable by default” instrumentation embedded directly in developer workflows. • Engineering standards. Setting technical standards, leading design and architecture reviews, and multiplying the effectiveness of engineers across all three teams. • Infrastructure impact. Contributing to Infrastructure-wide technical priorities beyond Observability, applying your judgment and expertise to problems that span teams and domains. • Enterprise influence. Representing Observability in cross-domain and enterprise architecture forums, and aligning the platform’s direction with the broader Target Tech strategy.

Success in this role requires exceptional technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity and consensus in ambiguous, high-scale environments.

What We’re Looking For This role is defined by three pillars. We expect a Principal Engineer to be outstanding across all three: Technical Depth. Deep, current expertise in distributed systems and high-volume telemetry pipelines — OpenTelemetry internals, columnar and time-series storage and query engines (e.g., ClickHouse, InfluxDB), streaming with Kafka, and performance, cost, and reliability engineering at scale. You can go deep enough to debug the pipeline and broad enough to shape the platform. Technical Leadership. Proven ability to influence across an organization without direct authority — setting standards, driving

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