Lead Engineer - Ad Tech

Job Summary

Role Overview: As a Lead Engineer (Ad Tech & Applied AI), you will provide technical leadership across backend platforms and emerging AI-powered capabilities. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to help define the technology strategy for Ad Tech platforms, including DSP, SSP and Ad Servers, supporting self-service advertising needs. You will assess build-versus-buy decisions for new capabilities through POCs and prototypes while considering long-term architecture, scalability, reliability and operational trade-offs. A key part of this role will be designing and building production-grade applications powered by Large Language Models and agentic systems, from experimentation through production operation and continuous evaluation. We are looking for engineers who have moved beyond conversational AI prototypes and have experience engineering LLM-powered systems that operate reliably within real business workflows.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to help define the technology strategy for Ad Tech platforms, including DSP, SSP and Ad Servers, supporting self-service advertising needs.
• Assess build-versus-buy decisions for new capabilities through POCs and prototypes while considering long-term architecture, scalability, reliability and operational trade-offs.
• Design and build production-grade applications powered by Large Language Models and agentic systems, from experimentation through production operation and continuous evaluation.
• Design architectures that combine deterministic software components with probabilistic AI capabilities, making deliberate decisions about where traditional code, rules and workflow engines should be used versus where LLM-driven reasoning and autonomous agents provide value.
• Lead engineering efforts to meet functional and non-functional requirements and assist teams in solving complex business challenges through scalable technical solutions.
• Work closely with engineering managers to build high-performing engineering teams and provide technical leadership, architecture guidance, coaching and mentoring. You will also participate in the selection of technical talent and contribute actively to Target's broader technical community.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience, with experience designing, building and operating complex distributed systems through at least one complete implementation lifecycle.
• You have strong backend engineering fundamentals and are comfortable designing scalable APIs, microservices, asynchronous systems and data-intensive applications.
• You are fluent in Java / Spring and microservices architecture, with experience building highly available production systems.
• You have experience working with databases including RDBMS and NoSQL technologies such as Cassandra and MongoDB.

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