Senior Director, Search (Data Sciences & Engineering)

About Us

Working at Target means helping all families discover the joy of everyday life. Every time a guest searches on Target.com or in the Target app, they are interacting with one of the most critical and high-impact systems in retail.

Search is the front door to digital commerce. It shapes discovery, trust, confidence, and conversion at massive scale. As Target continues to modernize our digital experiences, we are investing in building the next generation of intelligent, agentic search—moving from keyword matching to intent understanding, reasoning, and guided shopping experiences powered by advanced AI.

Role Overview

As the Senior Director of Search, you will lead a global organization of 60+ engineers, data scientists, and technical leaders responsible for building and evolving Target’s end-to-end Search ecosystem.

This role is accountable for the technical strategy, architecture, AI innovation, and operational excellence behind query understanding, semantic retrieval and ranking systems, relevance AI pipelines, search platform architecture, evaluation frameworks, and conversational and agentic search capabilities.

This is a leader-of-leaders role requiring both deep AI/search expertise and exceptional organizational leadership. You will develop top-tier talent, shape technical direction, and ensure Target builds a resilient, scalable, and future-ready search platform.

What You’ll Do

Set the Technical Vision for the Future of Search
• Define and evolve Target’s multi-year technical strategy for Search.
• Lead the transition toward agentic and conversational search systems.
• Advance capabilities in embeddings, semantic retrieval, transformers, reinforcement learning, and LLM-powered reasoning.
• Balance innovation with scalability, latency, cost, reliability, and governance.

Build and Scale an Agentic Search Ecosystem
• Develop AI systems enabling intent-aware query understanding and contextual signals.
• Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) where appropriate.
• Enable multi-turn conversational refinement and guided shopping experiences.
• Establish strong evaluation frameworks and experimentation systems.

Lead a High-Performing Technical Organization
• Lead and develop a global team of 60+ engineers and scientists.
• Build strong director-level and principal-level leadership bench strength.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, innovation, inclusion, and continuous learning.

Drive Responsible AI & Governance
• Implement monitoring frameworks for AI quality, bias, safety, and privacy.
• Ensure explainability, trust, and strong production standards.

Enterprise Partnership & Influence
• Partner deeply with Product, UX, Engineering, Merchandising, and Digital leadership.
• Translate AI strategy into clear executive narratives and long-term investment plans.

About You

• Advanced degree (PhD or MS) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, Mathematics, Statistics, or related field.
• 16+ years of experience building and scaling ML/AI systems in production.
• Deep expertise in Search and Information Retrieval, including learning-to-rank, NLP, transformers, embeddings, and retrieval architectures.
• Experience shipping AI/ML systems at scale in high-traffic consumer environments.
• Proven experience leading large global teams, including leader of leaders.
• Strong executive presence and ability to influence senior stakeholders.
• Experience integrating GenAI responsibly into consumer-facing systems preferred.

Why This Role Matters

Search is foundational to Target’s digital growth. This leader will shape how millions of guests discover products every day, define the technical future of AI-powered retail discovery, and develop the next generation of AI and engineering leaders at Target.