Engineer - Observability

Target Observability Engineer

The pay range is $73,200.00 - $131,700.00. 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.

Join our Observability team, a dynamic group that provides the vital telemetry pipeline and monitoring tools for all our engineering teams. We operate at an immense scale – for example, our platform handles on the order of 431 billion metrics and 93 billion log events every day, storing about 500 TB of data daily. We are not just consumers but active contributors to open-source projects like OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and ClickHouse, reflecting our commitment to innovation in the observability space.

As an Engineer, You Are a Technical Specialist

You help power the observability platform used across Target's engineering ecosystem. You build and maintain the high-scale systems that deliver metrics, traces, and logs for hundreds of teams across the enterprise. You develop a deep understanding of our telemetry pipeline and architecture, contributing code and insights that make the platform more performant, reliable, and cost-efficient. You consistently demonstrate sound engineering judgment and a commitment to quality — balancing fast iteration with well-designed, testable, and observable solutions. You take ownership of your work, handle operational issues with minimal oversight, and approach every problem with curiosity and accountability. You write production-ready code that is readable, secure, and resilient, and you participate in code and design reviews that raise the quality bar for your team. You are eager to learn the design and architecture of the observability platform and to understand how it supports the broader Target technology ecosystem. You participate in team ceremonies, share learnings, and seek feedback from peers and senior engineers. As your technical skills deepen, you contribute to design discussions and help shape the team's standards for testing, automation, and reliability.

As an engineer, you will:

• Build and evolve Target's observability platform, delivering scalable, high-performance, and reliable telemetry services that power the entire engineering ecosystem.
• Write, maintain, and improve code primarily in Go, while also working across multiple languages and frameworks from backend services to frontend tooling demonstrating flexibility and a desire to learn new technologies as needed.
• Participate in design and code reviews, ensuring solutions are performant, testable, and secure, and that code quality standards are consistently met across the team.
• Collaborate with peers and senior engineers to research innovative technologies, contribute to proof-of-concept efforts, and evaluate solutions for performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Apply automation and observability best practices to improve deployment, recovery, and monitoring workflows, supporting the reliability of Target's technology ecosystem.
• Take ownership of your work, delivering quality solutions within defined scope and timelines, and seek support when encountering complex or unfamiliar challenges.
• Engage in testing and operational readiness, including disaster recovery and integration testing, helping ensure services meet architectural, security, and operational standards.
• Participate in an on-call rotation responding to incidents and maintaining operational performance to meet our product SLOs.

About You

You have:

• Four-year degree or equivalent experience
• 1+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language, with a strong preference for Go (GoLang) or a demonstrated ability to quickly learn new languages and frameworks.
• Willingness to work across the stack — from backend services to frontend applications — and openness to learning new technologies and tools as the team's needs evolve.
• Familiarity with distributed systems concepts, APIs, and data flows, and ability to apply these concepts to practical engineering problems.
• Understanding of software testing practices, including writing unit and integration tests, and commitment to building reliable, maintainable solutions.
• Awareness of core observability concepts such as metrics, logs, and traces, or a desire to develop expertise in this space.
• Demonstrates a growth mindset: seeks feedback, learns from experience, and stays current with emerging technologies.
• Approaches work with curiosity, accountability, and collaboration — delivering high-quality results while contributing to a supportive team 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.