Sr Service Manager

About Us:

Target is one of the world’s most recognized brands and a leading U.S. retailer. Behind the experiences our guests love is a technology organization focused on innovation, reliability, and delivering seamless experiences across stores, digital channels, supply chain, and enterprise platforms.

Target Tech plays a critical role in helping Target deliver on our purpose: to help all families discover the joy of everyday life—wherever and however they shop.

As part of the Reliability and Response Management team, you will help protect the reliability and resilience of Target’s technology ecosystem by leading the response to significant and major technology incidents.

Pyramid Overview:

Infrastructure
The Infrastructure organization designs, delivers, and operates foundational technology platforms and services across Target, ensuring operational excellence, cost efficiency, and seamless technology experiences.

Reliability
Within Infrastructure, the Reliability organization strengthens technology resilience by embedding prevention, rapid recovery, and continuous learning into how we build and operate technology.

Our Reliability Teams

Reliability brings together specialized teams across Response Management, Reliability Engineering (Tools & Observability), Disaster Recovery, IT Service Management (ServiceNow Platform), and Reliability Product to drive operational stability, service excellence, and continuous improvement across Target Tech.

About the Role:

As a Sr Service Manager– Major Incident Management, you will lead the end-to-end response to high-impact technology incidents affecting Target’s guests, team members, operations, and business capabilities.

You will serve as the central point of coordination during major incidents, bringing together engineering, infrastructure, product, operations, and business teams to rapidly assess impact, establish priorities, drive decisions, and restore services.

This role requires strong leadership under pressure, technical curiosity, excellent judgment, and the ability to turn complex and rapidly changing information into clear actions and communications.

Beyond incident response, you will help strengthen Target’s overall reliability by identifying recurring patterns, facilitating effective incident retrospectives, and partnering with teams to improve response practices and reduce future business impact.

Core Responsibilities

As a Response Manager, you will:

• Lead major incident response from detection and assessment through mobilization, mitigation, service restoration, and closure.
• Establish command and control during significant incidents by defining priorities, coordinating responders, maintaining focus, and driving the incident toward resolution.
• Assess business and technology impact to ensure incidents are appropriately prioritized and escalated.
• Drive timely decision-making by identifying blockers, clarifying ownership, escalating when necessary, and maintaining momentum throughout the response.
• Coordinate cross-functional response teams across engineering, infrastructure, networking, cloud, product, operations, and other technology and business partners.
• Maintain situational awareness by continuously gathering, validating, and synthesizing technical and business information throughout an incident.
• Deliver clear incident communications that provide stakeholders and leaders with timely, accurate, and actionable information.
• Facilitate incident bridges and response channels, ensuring discussions remain structured, focused, and aligned to restoration priorities.
• Lead effective transitions and handoffs during extended incidents to maintain continuity and response quality.
• Identify incident trends and systemic risks using operational data, recurring failure patterns, and lessons from previous incidents.
• Drive continuous improvement of incident-management processes, standards, tooling, documentation, and response practices.
• Partner with technology teams to strengthen operational readiness, including escalation paths, response procedures, documentation, and preparedness for critical events.
• Promote Target’s Reliability Pillars and incident-management best practices across the technology organization.

Technology and Business Domains

You will work across a broad and interconnected technology landscape supporting areas such as:

• Stores and point-of-sale technologies
• Digital and guest-facing platforms
• Supply chain and fulfillment
• Merchandising and inventory systems
• Enterprise applications and services
• Cloud and Compute infrastructure
• Network and connectivity services
• Application and platform ecosystems
• Third-party and external technology dependencies

You do not need to be the technical expert in every domain. You do need the ability to quickly understand complex systems, ask effective questions, connect technical issues to business impact, and bring the right people together to solve problems.

About You

You bring:

• 7–12 years of relevant experience, with specialized expertise in Major Incident Management, technology operations, and leading the resolution of critical incidents in complex, large-scale enterprise environments.
• Experience in technology operations, production support, site reliability, infrastructure, application support, incident management, or a related technical discipline.
• Demonstrated experience leading or coordinating significant and major technology incidents.
• Strong facilitation and leadership skills, particularly in high-pressure and time-sensitive situations.
• The ability to remain composed, organized, and decisive when information is incomplete or rapidly changing.
• Broad understanding of modern technology environments, including applications, infrastructure, networks, cloud platforms, and distributed systems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to distinguish symptoms, impact, contributing factors, and restoration priorities.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical situations clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong stakeholder-management skills and the ability to influence outcomes across teams without relying on direct authority.
• Experience facilitating post-incident reviews, retrospectives, or similar continuous-improvement activities.
• An understanding of incident, problem, change, and reliability-management practices.
• Familiarity with ITIL concepts and industry incident-management practices.
• A collaborative, accountable, and continuous-improvement mindset.

Retail technology experience and experience supporting highly available, large-scale, or business-critical systems are beneficial.

Additional Information

This role operates in an environment where technology and business priorities continue to evolve. Responsibilities may change based on organizational needs, emerging technologies, operational priorities, and opportunities to strengthen Target’s reliability and response capabilities.