Position Overview As a Principal AI Engineer - Advanced AI, you'll join Target's Advanced AI team, a centralized group focused on building and owning capabilities that use advanced AI technologies to drive automation, insight, and action across core business workflows. In this role, you'll provide deep technical leadership across enterprise AI initiatives by partnering with engineering, product, and business teams to shape scalable solution patterns, accelerate development, and deliver high-impact AI applications that optimize business workflows and create measurable value. You will help design, build, deploy, and scale end-to-end AI solutions, including architecting agentic and LLM-powered systems, evaluating and selecting the right models and frameworks, and establishing strong observability, evaluation, and engineering practices to ensure solutions are production-ready, maintainable, and well-documented. Given the pace of change in this space, you will also stay current on emerging technologies, recommend tooling and architectural approaches, publish learnings for the team and broader organization, and influence technical direction and engineering standards across Advanced AI initiatives. 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: PhD or MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics or a related technical field preferred Deep experience designing and delivering real-world AI and machine learning solutions including LLM-based, agentic, or other advanced AI systems in production environments 10 plus years of demonstrated hands-on experience in software engineering and applied AI/ML development - including Python and modern ML / deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow or similar tools Extensive experience with AI engineering tooling and platforms such as agent development frameworks, model APIs, evaluation and observability frameworks, cloud ML platforms, containers, and orchestration technologies Strong understanding of system design, model and architecture tradeoffs, experimentation, evaluation strategy, performance optimization, and production deployment considerations for AI systems Experience building scalable, maintainable, and well-tested services or platforms including version control, CI/CD, code review practices, and operational monitoring Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical approaches and create strong technical documentation, narratives, and recommendations for a range of audiences Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical partners and leaders Self-driven and results-oriented, with strong ownership, sound judgment, and the ability to move quickly while maintaining high technical standards in a fast-evolving domain Collaborative team player with experience working effectively across functions, organizations, and geographies, and with a demonstrated commitment to continuous learning and knowledge sharing

About Target

Target is one of the world’s most recognized brands and one of America’s leading retailers. We make Target our guests’ preferred shopping destination by offering outstanding value, inspiration, innovation and an exceptional guest experience that no other retailer can deliver. Target is committed to responsible corporate citizenship, ethical business practices, environmental stewardship and generous community support. Since 1946, we have given 5 percent of our profits back to our communities. Our goal is to work as one team to fulfill our unique brand promise to our guests, wherever and whenever they choose to shop.