Lead Data Engineer

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.

About the Role:
As a Lead Data Engineer, you will serve as the technical anchor for the engineering team, responsible for designing and developing scalable, high-performance data solutions. You will own and drive data architecture that supports both functional and non-functional business needs, ensuring reliability, efficiency, and scalability.
Your expertise in big data technologies, distributed systems, and cloud platforms will help shape the engineering roadmap and best practices for data processing, analytics, and real-time data serving. You will play a key role in architecting and optimizing data pipelines using Hadoop, Spark, Scala/Java, and cloud technologies to support enterprise-wide data initiatives.
Additionally, experience with API development for serving low-latency data and Customer Data Platforms (CDP) will be a strong plus.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and build scalable, high-performance data pipelines and distributed data processing solutions using Hadoop, Spark, Scala/Java, and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure).

• Design and implement real-time and batch data processing solutions, ensuring data is efficiently processed and made available for analytical and operational use.

• Develop APIs and data services to expose low-latency, high-throughput data for downstream applications, enabling real-time decision-making.

• Optimize and enhance data models, workflows, and processing frameworks to improve performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency.

• Drive data governance, security, and compliance best practices.

• Collaborate with data scientists, product teams, and business stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver data-driven solutions.

• Lead the design, implementation, and lifecycle management of data services and solutions.

• Stay up to date with emerging technologies and drive adoption of best practices in big data engineering, cloud computing, and API development.

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, promoting best practices in data engineering and API design.

About You:

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, software development, or distributed systems.

• Expertise in big data technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, and distributed processing frameworks.

• Strong programming skills in Scala and/or Java (Python is a plus).

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and their data ecosystem (e.g., S3, BigQuery, Databricks, EMR, Snowflake, etc.).

• Proficiency in API development using REST, GraphQL, or gRPC to serve real-time and batch data.

• Experience with real-time and streaming data architectures (Kafka, Flink, Kinesis, etc.).

• Strong knowledge of data modeling, ETL pipeline design, and performance optimization.

• Understanding of data governance, security, and compliance in large-scale data environments.

• Experience with Customer Data Platforms (CDP) or customer-centric data processing is a strong plus.

• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work in complex, unstructured environments.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience working in cross-functional teams.

Why Join Us?

• Work with cutting-edge big data, API, and cloud technologies in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

• Influence and shape the future of data architecture and real-time data services at Target.

• Solve high-impact business problems using scalable, low-latency data solutions.

• Be part of a culture that values innovation, learning, and growth.