Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - AI Platforms (ML, LLMs, APIs, ML Ops)

The pay range is $132,000.00 - $238,000.00 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 at https://corporate.target.com/careers/benefits . JOIN TARGET AS A LEAD ENGINEER – FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEERING - AI PLATFORMS 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. As a Lead Forward Deployed Engineer - AI Platforms (FDE), you will help accelerate the adoption of Target's enterprise AI platform by working with product and engineering teams to solve complex technical challenges, enable platform capabilities, and help teams build and operate production-grade AI applications.  You will operate at the intersection of AI engineering, platform engineering, and product development bringing technical expertise in software architecture, distributed systems, LLMs, and agentic systems. You will combine hands-on engineering with technical guidance, solution architecture, and development of reusable tools and solutions that improve how teams adopt and use the enterprise AI platform A key part of this role is learning from real-world implementations and using those insights to improve the broader AI platform. You will collaborate across engineering teams to identify recurring challenges, address adoption friction, and help translate successful implementation patterns into scalable platform capabilities. As a Lead FDE Engineer, you bring broad technical expertise and help guide complex engineering efforts across teams and systems. You can independently design and implement production-grade architectures while improving the effectiveness of others through technical guidance, engineering practices, and collaborative problem-solving. You help teams navigate architectural tradeoffs, raise engineering quality, and connect technical decisions to long-term platform and product outcomes. As a Lead Engineer within Forward Deployed Engineering, you’ll: • Lead complex technical engagements that accelerate enterprise AI platform adoption, combining solution architecture, hands-on engineering, and technical guidance to help teams move from experimentation to production • Design, build, and productionize AI solutions, reference implementations, technical tooling, and platform-support capabilities using LLMs, agentic architectures, enterprise context and retrieval, model APIs, and tool integrations • Guide technical design and implementation across engineering efforts, helping teams navigate complex architectural decisions, troubleshoot challenges, and develop scalable, maintainable solutions • Apply software engineering and distributed systems expertise to improve the reliability, security, performance, observability, and op readiness of production AI systems • Identify recurring implementation challenges, integration gaps, and platform limitations, collaborating with platform engineering to develop reusable patterns, APIs, SDKs, frameworks, and shared capabilities • Help establish