Senior Engineering Manager - Observability

Senior Engineering Manager, 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 24 by 7 production environments. Technologies commonly used across the team include Golang, Kubernetes, Kafka, ClickHouse, InfluxDB, Grafana, and React that support high volume telemetry pipelines.

We are moving beyond traditional monitoring. Our ambition is to build 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 Senior Engineering Manager, you will lead one of three engineering teams delivering enterprise observability capabilities. You will partner closely with peer managers, product, and a Principal Engineer to shape the technical roadmap and deliver a unified, intelligent reliability platform for Target Tech.

You will be accountable for:

• Building and leading a high performing team of platform and full stack engineers
• Delivering mission critical, highly available observability systems
• Scaling telemetry pipelines and analytics across thousands of applications
• Embedding reliability and operational excellence directly into developer workflows
• Representing your team in cross domain architecture and enterprise planning forums

At Target scale, you will lead engineers solving distributed systems and reliability challenges that are not documented in standard playbooks.

Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, clear communication, operational discipline, and the ability to drive clarity in ambiguous environments.

Why This Role Is Compelling

This role sits at the center of one of Target's top enterprise priorities. You will directly shape how reliability, performance, and operational intelligence are delivered across the company.

You will:

• Influence how thousands of engineers build and operate software
• Shape the evolution from reactive monitoring to AI assisted and autonomous reliability
• Protect revenue, brand trust, and guest experience through resilient platform design
• Lead engineers solving distributed systems challenges at enterprise retail scale
• Play a visible role in advancing Target's intelligence powered architecture

If you are motivated by scale, impact, and deep technical challenges, this role offers all three.

What Success Looks Like

Within 12 to 18 months, you will have:

• Increased SLO coverage and reliability visibility across production applications
• Reduced mean time to detect and mean time to engage during critical incidents
• Expanded standard telemetry adoption and improved operational data quality
• Delivered measurable improvements in developer experience for reliability workflows
• Built a strong, inclusive, and accountable engineering culture aligned to enterprise outcomes

About You

You are a technical leader first and a people leader always. You are comfortable engaging in architecture discussions, telemetry design, distributed systems, and failure analysis while coaching engineers and managers to grow in scope and influence.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 1–3 years of people leadership or equivalent delivery ownership.
• Proven experience building and operating cloud-native, distributed systems and high-performance APIs at scale.
• Strong background in resilient production architecture, reliability engineering, and raising engineering standards.
• Demonstrated product leadership (roadmaps, OKRs, migration execution) and experience with contract-driven or schema-governed platforms.
• Track record of building and developing high-performing teams within large enterprise environments.
• Ability to influence cross-domain stakeholders and drive alignment across complex ecosystems.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts for diverse audiences.
• Deep understanding of Agile, CI/CD, and incremental value delivery.
• Preferred: knowledge of Target infrastructure and platform services, vendor management experience, and leading geographically distributed teams.

Desired experience includes:

• Coaching and mentoring engineers on architecture and modern engineering practices
• Supporting and operating 24 by 7 business critical capabilities
• Building and operating large scale telemetry or data intensive distributed systems
• Designing and deploying scalable APIs and microservices Instrumenting products with metrics, logs, and traces to make them observable by default
• Utilizing version control systems such as Git Working in Linux or Unix based environments
• Communicating complex technical solutions clearly across diverse audiences
• Working effectively across multiple teams in a product-oriented environment

This position will operate as a Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement based on Target's needs. A Hybrid/Flex for Your Day work arrangement means the team member's core role will need to be performed both onsite at the Target HQ MN location the role is assigned to and virtually, depending upon what your role, team and tasks require for that day. Work duties cannot be performed outside of the country of the primary work location, unless otherwise prescribed by Target. Click here if you are curious to learn more about Minnesota.

Benefits Eligibility

Please paste this url into your preferred browser to learn about benefits eligibility for this role: https://tgt.biz/BenefitsForYou_E

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

In compliance with state and federal laws, Target will make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please reach out to candidate.accommodations@HRHelp.Target.com. Non-accommodation-related requests, such as application follow-ups or technical issues, will not be addressed through this channel.