Target
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target.com
Job details:
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.
Senior Engineering Manager, Container Controlplane
Working at Target means shaping experiences for hundreds of millions of guests while operating one of the largest retail technology platforms in the world. We are a Fortune 50 company with more than 450,000 team members globally.
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 builders to deliver secure, intelligent, and high-performing products at enterprise scale.
About The Container Controlplane Team
The Container Controlplane team is responsible for the Managed Containers experience in TAP and for orchestrating the deployment of team applications to each supported location, including on-prem environments, GCP, stores, and distribution centers.
This team is managed across Target US and Target India, with co-leadership from the manager in each location. The team owns the APIs that power the Managed Containers experience in TAP, as well as the deployment pipeline used to create, update, and delete Managed Container workloads.
Container Controlplane sits at the intersection of platform engineering, distributed systems, developer experience, orchestration, and operational reliability. The team is responsible for enabling a consistent, scalable, and self-service experience for teams that build and deploy the applications Target relies on to run its business.
Today The Team Enables
- Managed Containers capabilities in TAP for application teams across on-prem, GCP, stores, and distribution centers.
- Deployment orchestration for creating, updating, and deleting Managed Container workloads.
- Placement decisions for workloads across supported locations.
- Health and status management for running workloads through service discovery and control mechanisms.
- Sidecar configuration for proxy authentication and observability.
- Access control and deployment workflows for specialized provider locations such as GCP and store/distribution center environments.
- Self-service deployment experiences that allow teams to deploy workloads at will.
- Our strategic thesis: Managed Containers are not just a deployment abstraction. They are a platform capability that must make it easy for Target teams to run applications wherever the business needs them, while still providing strong reliability, security, and operational consistency across a highly distributed environment.
About The Role
As Senior Engineering Manager for Container Controlplane, you will lead the engineering team responsible for building, operating, and evolving Target’s Managed Containers controlplane. You will co-lead the function with your US counterpart, manage the Target India team, and help shape the technical and operational direction of the platform.
This is a balanced leadership role. You will be expected to provide strong people leadership, delivery execution, and technical guidance. You will not simply manage a backlog. You will help make decisions about platform APIs, placement logic, deployment workflows, workload health, access control, sidecar behavior, and the gradual evolution of the platform as Target modernizes how container workloads are orchestrated across supported environments.
You will help establish the new sister team in TI, partner closely with the US leader counterpart, and jointly drive roadmap execution for the second half of 2026. A key priority for the team will be helping accelerate Availability Zone adoption as part of Data Center Modernization.
You will also help the team evolve capabilities currently owned by the controlplane, including spinning off inherited capabilities where appropriate and reducing dependency on HashiCorp services such as Consul and Vault as Target scales its container workload platform.
You Will Be Accountable For
- Team leadership: Leading, coaching, and developing a growing engineering team responsible for Container Controlplane capabilities in Target India.
- Managed Containers delivery: Shipping reliable, scalable, and secure control plane capabilities that support the Managed Containers experience in TAP.
- Deployment orchestration: Owning the deployment pipeline and orchestration services used to create, update, and delete Managed Container workloads across supported locations.
- Platform API delivery: Delivering high-quality backend platform services and APIs that provide a consistent, self-service experience for Target engineering teams.
- Workload placement and control: Maintaining and improving the placement engine for workloads across supported environments, including on-prem, GCP, stores, and distribution centers.
- Workload health and status: Ensuring the platform can accurately represent the health and status of running workloads and provide dependable control plane behavior.
- Security and access control: Partnering with infrastructure, networking, and security teams to manage access controls for provider locations and ensure the deployment experience remains secure and appropriate for each environment.
- Technical direction and roadmap: Co-owning roadmap and architecture decisions with the US leader counterpart, while helping shape engineering practices, delivery execution, and technical standards.
- Operational health: Owning the operational health of the team’s services, including incident response readiness, reliability improvements, and service maturity.
- Cross-functional execution: Partnering closely with the US sister controlplane team, Target Kubernetes Engine, stores container platform, and other infrastructure teams to align dependencies and remove blockers.
- Talent and culture: Recruiting, developing, and retaining strong engineers while building a culture grounded in ownership, technical rigor, collaboration, inclusion, and continuous improvement.
Why This Role
Target’s application teams depend on Managed Containers to deploy and operate critical services across a diverse set of environments. That requires a controlplane that is not only functionally correct, but also scalable, secure, reliable, and easy to use across a broad enterprise footprint.
At Target scale, this work requires more than API delivery. It requires strong platform leadership across distributed systems, deployment orchestration, access control, workload placement, service health, and the evolution of the control plane as the broader container ecosystem changes. Teams need the ability to move quickly without compromising reliability, while the platform itself must support many different locations and operating models.
This role gives you the opportunity to lead a team that directly influences how Target teams deploy and manage containerized workloads across the enterprise. You will help strengthen the Managed Containers experience in TAP, improve platform maturity, and partner across Target Tech to build a dependable foundation for application teams.
If you want to lead a team that builds customer-facing platform capabilities at scale and helps shape how Target deploys workloads across its most important environments, we want to talk.
About You
You are a technical engineering leader who understands that platform engineering is not just about building services. It is about creating the APIs, workflows, and operating model that let application teams deploy safely and productively at enterprise scale.
You are comfortable working across deep infrastructure topics and senior stakeholder outcomes. You can lead engineers through ambiguity, make pragmatic technical tradeoffs, partner across teams in different geographies, and bring strong product thinking to internal platform capabilities.
You care about outcomes: high-quality output, reliable deployments, better platform usability, strong operational health, and a team culture that consistently delivers for internal customers.
Required Qualifications
- 6+ years of software engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems experience.
- 2+ years leading engineering teams, including responsibility for delivery, talent development, technical execution, and operational outcomes.
- Experience building or operating customer-facing platform capabilities at scale.
- Strong working knowledge of platform APIs, orchestration workflows, deployment systems, and distributed service design.
- Experience with Kubernetes or Kubernetes-adjacent platform environments.
- Experience with Java, Groovy, Ratpack, CI/CD, or platform backend service development.
- Strong understanding of reliability, observability, incident response, and operational maturity in production environments.
- Proven ability to lead technical decision-making and guide architecture discussions across reliability, scale, security, and developer experience.
- Experience partnering with cross-functional infrastructure, networking, observability, and security teams in a large enterprise environment.
- Ability to communicate technical strategy, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to senior engineering stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to build strong teams, coach engineers, improve execution discipline, and create an inclusive engineering culture.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience leading platform or infrastructure teams across geographically distributed organizations.
- Experience with Managed Container or internal developer platform experiences.
- Experience with Kubernetes platform concepts and workloads, even if not owning cluster operations directly.
- Familiarity with Golang.
- Experience with service placement, orchestration engines, workload health systems, or deployment pipelines.
- Experience with service discovery, identity, secrets management, or sidecar-based platform patterns.
- Experience with availability zone strategies, data center modernization, or workload expansion across multiple environment types.
- Experience migrating away from legacy platform dependencies while maintaining service reliability and customer experience.
- Retail, financial services, healthcare, or other large-enterprise technology leadership experience.
- Target is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members.
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