We are Target tech

Technologists committed to making Target America's easiest, safest, and most joyful place to shop and work

Mosaic of Target Team members
Seven members of the Target cybersecurity team, including CISO Rich Agostino and Vice President Jodie Kautt, pictured holding five crystal awards, standing in front of RH-ISAC banner.

Target Cybersecurity Team Earns Top Honors at Annual Cyber Summit

Target’s cybersecurity team was recently recognized as the 2023 “Team of the Year” by the RH-ISAC. These awards traditionally acknowledge teams who strengthen our intelligence community by making an extra effort to share information and practices for the benefit of others. Congratulations to the team on their well-deserved honor.

Read more about the winners
Cyber security leaders from the retail industry, including Target’s VP Jodie Kautt, seated on the stage at the NRF PROTECT conference

Target’s VP of Cybersecurity Jodie Kautt on the Future of Retail Security

Target’s vice president of cybersecurity Jodie Kautt recently joined other retail leaders at the National Retail Federation’s NRF PROTECT conference. She shared insights on how we blend security and guest experience, while innovating solutions and building custom technology to combat cyber crime.”

Read the article

Work somewhere you love.

Target’s technology team members are on the cutting-edge of retail innovation, and get to see their work in real time in stores across the country. Join us to see why we are recognized as a great place to work, and to engineer the future of retail.

Search openings and apply
  • Interior shot of a meeting in a corporate Target office, with a man in a checked button down shirt sitting next to a woman looking at a laptop and smiling, and another man in a dark colored sweater sitting to her other side

    Self-Management for Software Engineers

    By Molly King, December 5, 2023
    Read tips on how to take control of your career path.
  • Circuit board photographed in red light.

    Firmware Updates: What They Are and Why They Matter

    By Sandeep Mendiratta, November 14, 2023
    Learn how Target Infrastructure engineers built a fully automated firmware update system.
  • a person's hand holding a smart phone with a grocery list on the screen, including items like apples, orange juice, granola, and eggs

    Elevating Guest Repurchasing Behavior Using Buy It Again Recommendations

    By Amit Pande and Rankyung Park, November 2, 2023
    Target’s Data Science team shares an inside look at our Buy It Again model.
  • Team member scans inventory in Target electronics aisle

    Solving for Product Availability with AI

    By Brad Thompson and Meredith Jordan, October 24, 2023
    Read about how Target uses AI to improve product availability in stores.
  • A diagram of a mobile device interacting with Point of Sale devices via POSSUM web APIs

    Introducing POSSUM, An Open Source Retail Peripheral Platform for All

    By Adam Nawrocki, September 27, 2023
    Learn about our newest open source product which provides hardware abstraction for industry standard retail peripherals.
  • A Target Team Member is fulfilling a Drive Up order with a guest at their car.

    Building a Flexible Platform to Power Target Drive Up

    By Jathin Jayan, September 7, 2023
    Learn more about Target's Eventing API that makes our Drive Up service possible.
  • graphic describing the three ways in which cyber capabilities apply to ORC - research the adversary, prevent and detect attacks, and investigate and respond

    Applying Cyber Principles to Combatting Organized Retail Crime

    By Jodie Kautt, August 29, 2023
    How Target's cyber team collaborates to combat fraud
  • cartoon drawing of a smiling child with pigtails, glasses, and braces on her teeth. she's smiling widely while holding a beautiful teapot with hearts popping up around her head.

    Designing Engineering

    By Emi Lyman, August 8, 2023
    How art and design principles are applied to designing tech repositories at Target.
  • TAC Architecture model showing a sequence dataset on the left with an arrow flowing right to a multi-layered model training, with an arrow to the right pointing to a representation of real time recommendations with model files and recommended items

    Target AutoComplete: Real Time Item Recommendations at Target

    By Bhavtosh Rath, July 25, 2023
    A look at our Data Science team's patent-pending AI recommendation model
  • Target's patented EasySweep skimmer detection device, shown with a payment terminal that is safe to use, and one with a skimming device installed that puts guest data at risk

    Target's EasySweep – Simplifying Skimmer Detection for All

    By Terry Woodman, July 18, 2023
    Target's patented EasySweep device protects guests' data from skimmers.
  • example of an image (a hand-drawn camping scene with a tent, kayak, and river) shown in original format, with a lower image contrast, and then with CSS filters reapplied

    Sharing Knowledge on Image Optimization Using Internal Blogs

    By JJ Wittrock-Roske, June 1, 2023
    Learnings from the recent Smashingconf, and how they apply to the Web team's work at Target.
  • map of the world with blue dots indicating edge locations, with high concentrations in India, southeast Asia, central Europe, Brazil, and the eastern United States

    What is Edge Computing and How Can it Improve Your Website’s Performance?

    By Liam Robinson, May 18, 2023
    Deep dive on edge computing and edge functions and how they can be used.
  • diagram showing how inputs from the Target web or mobile app feed into a personalization engine that flows through to three microservices that get their data from a Hadoop cluster, model files, and feed back into the microservices and to the feature store before being routed back to the consumer

    Real-Time Personalization Using Microservices

    By Amit Pande, Pushkar Chennu, and Prathyusha Kanmanth Reddy, May 11, 2023
    How Target's Personalization team uses microservices to improve our guest experience
  • Identity Management Day 2023 logo on the left with round fingerprint-like design behind the words, and headshot of Target Senior Director of Cyber Solutions Tom Sheffield who is pictured smiling wearing a blue button down shirt and gray blazer against a red couch, with red carpet and atrium in the background

    Moving from "Or" to "And"

    By Tech @ Target, April 11, 2023
    Interview with Senior Director Tom Sheffield to explore what Identity Management means at Target.
  • Target Cybersecurity Analyst Dat Dang, pictured smiling against a corporate conference room background, wearing eyeglasses, a button-down shirt, and navy blue blazer

    "Friday Five" - Featuring Dat Dang, Lead Cybersecurity Analyst

    By Tech @ Target, March 3, 2023
    Profile of Target Lead Cybersecurity Analyst Dat Dang
  • status page screenshot from Gogs showing a Docker pipeline with a malicious config file called "evil.local:8080/payload"

    CI/CD Pipeline Incident Response

    By Kyle Shattuck and Brandon Ingalls, February 16, 2023
    An actionable incident response playbook for your CI/CD pipeline.
  • Target Senior Engineer Kaylee Edwards, with long blonde hair, smiling and wearing a white button down shirt and black cardigan. She is standing next to Target's mascot Bullseye, a white bull terrier with red Target logo around his eye. They appear in front of a background of colorful balloons.

    “Friday Five” Featuring Kaylee Edwards, Senior Engineer – Agile and Engineering Enablement

    By Tech @ Target, January 13, 2023
    Profile of Target Senior Engineer Kaylee Edwards
  • two Target engineers, photographed from the back, looking at a laptop screen together. The person on the left side has short dark hair and is wearing a black sweatshirt, the person on the left has long blueish green hair and is wearing a black top with a white pattern

    Do You Know What We Did Last Summer?

    By Molly King, December 21, 2022
    Here are three perspectives on the 50 Days of Learning mobile apps summer learning hours effort.
  • light purple rectangle with five white circles in a horizontal line, each with a white icon inside. From left to right, icons include a sheet of paper with lines, a gear with tools against a browser window, a large white robot, a screen with circular arrows, and a check mark in a white circle

    Synthetics: Continuous Assurance of Detection Components

    By Paul Hutelmyer, December 13, 2022
    This post provides a solution for utilizing synthetic events for the purpose of validating signature integrity and functionality, with the goal of achieving continuous assurance of a system’s detection signatures.
  • A woman with short blonde hair wearing a tan and white striped shirt and denim overalls uses a self-checkout register in a Target store to purchase a basket of grocery items.

    Target’s ECCO Platform: Achieving Resiliency and High Availability

    By Shesadri Parthasarathy, December 1, 2022
    A deep dive on Target's Enterprise Cart & Checkout (ECCO) platform - the underlying technology that powers our checkout experience across Target.com, the Target mobile app, and nearly 2,000 stores.
  • Target tech x BUiLT: Technical Mentorship, Reimagined

    By Brenda Bjerke and Nii Quarshie, November 17, 2022
    How two Target cybersecurity team members reimagined their mentorship relationship and what they learned
  • rocky outcrop of a mountain with a gnarled tree growing out from the stones, with a beautiful cloudy mountain scene in the background

    Chaos Leads to Resilience

    By Deepa Kn, November 10, 2022
    How Target uses chaos experiments to test the resilience of our architecture.
  • Camp Cyber logo with a line drawing of a nighttime camping scene, and "Camp Cyber" written in letters that look like logs, next to headshot of Target CISO Rich Agostino

    Cybersecurity “State of the State”

    By Tech @ Target, November 4, 2022
    October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, recognized annually in the United States since 2004 as an opportunity to educate people about steps they can take to enhance the security of their digital worlds.
  • Target ICCON conference logo next to Target tech logo

    Target’s Cloud Journey

    By Hari Govind, October 21, 2022
    Target began its cloud journey nearly a decade ago. Since then, Target tech teams have expanded our technology footprint to a hybrid-multi-cloud architecture.
  • Joana Cruz and Connie Yu, pictured presenting on stage, in discussion  and standing smiling with former Target CIO Mike McNamara, wearing red shirts with white Target bullseye logos and conference nametag lanyards

    Meet Target Tech’s Grace Hopper Conference Presenters

    By Tech @ Target, September 15, 2022
    One way our team loves to celebrate women in technology is through the annual Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC).
  • a series of five white icons in circles on a lavender background, from the far left icons picture a device that appears to have a variety of connections to it, an icon of a sheet of paper with lines on it, a cute dog icon with a space helmet, a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass above it, and an icon of a browser window

    Strelka: Real-Time Threat Hunting Scanner

    By Paul Hutelmyer, August 24, 2022
    Strelka is a real-time, container-based, file scanning system used for threat hunting, threat detection, and incident response, built by our Target cybersecurity team.
  • logo for Target Tech Kids with a red Target bullseye logo on the left, and the the words "tech kids" spelled out in black, with a red robot icon in place of the "i" in "kids"

    Target Tech Kids: Spotlight on STEM

    By Beth Miller and Rebecca Roeder, August 17, 2022
    Target Tech Kids (TTK) is a philanthropic effort that delivers STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and resources for K-8 students, with a focus on underserved communities with low rates of subject matter exposure. We established the program in 2018 and this year we plan to share our passion with our biggest in-person event yet at the Minnesota State Fair's STEM Day celebration!
  • red Target bullseye logo with stylized dark grey letters spelling "ryse" in line and to the right of the bullseye

    How Target's Ryse Coaching Team Brings Learning Close in a Virtual World

    By Michael 'Miggs' Migliacio, August 8, 2022
    Ryse software engineering coaches empower Target tech team members with the knowledge and enterprise tools they need to build the future of retail technology. Ryse coaches are engineers, developers, advocates, instructors, facilitators, and cultural change agents – all in one. We tackle some of the organizations’ biggest technical alignment issues, serve as advisors and advocates for technologies and patterns in use throughout the organization, and run experiments across the company to test new ways of working and learning together.
  • screenshot of JupyterLab Git extension in a browser window. Left hand side of the image shows a highlighted puzzle piece icon with a list of extensions with brief descriptions and install links underneath. The JupyterLab extension is highlighted with arrows pointing to the install button and extension manager.

    Developing JupyterLab Extensions

    By Arman Shah, August 2, 2022
    Target’s technologists are encouraged to take advantage of “50 Days of Learning,” a program that enables engineers to spend time exploring new technologies or learning new languages and systems. I wanted to learn more about developing my own extensions and used some of my learning time to dive into the issue.
  • image of Target mascot Bullseye, a white bull terrier with a red target around his eye, looking at an open laptop against a red background

    👍 Custom Emoji Management: How Target enhances its tech culture with creativity 🎨 and technology 🕹

    By Jay Kline, July 28, 2022
    When Target HQ first started to use chat systems, those systems allowed simple emoji usage, quickly turning :-) into 😀, and a few other simple faces. As chat technology evolved, Unicode standardized more sophisticated emoji. Eventually, many chat systems allowed administrators and sometimes users to add custom emoji. This gave us some leeway and ability to get creative when it came to what emoji to use when chatting internally at Target.
  • diagram of Target system architecture with tenants listed on top (retail, analytical, and IT) with three buckets of components for each listed below. Retail components (shared services, aggregations, and core data), analytical (aggregations, analytical data sets, historic core) and IT (matching the retail components)

    Hardening the Registers: A Cascading Failure of Edge Induced Fault Tolerance

    By John Engelman, June 22, 2022
    In 2017, Target announced that we had prioritized stores at the center of how we serve our guests – no matter how they choose to shop. To make this store-as-hubs model work, we spent several years redesigning operations and modernizing how we conduct business. We invested billions of dollars into remodeling stores, hardened our world-class supply chain, and created a robust suite of fulfillment options to meet every guest need.
  • diagram showing a hypothetical POS architecture, with a register on top, flowing into a box labeled "cart service," that then flows ID data into three buckets named price, promo, and item, each flowing into separate databases labeled "PromoDB"

    Triaging in Target’s Distributed Point of Sale Ecosystem

    By Tyghe Vallard, June 9, 2022
    Across Target.com and nearly 2,000 stores, we run a complex and highly distributed point of sale (POS) ecosystem. And as we invest heavily in a great omnichannel POS experience, we continue to develop and scale new features for a variety of applications including store registers and self-checkout, our team members’ handheld myDevices, and our award-winning guest mobile app. As a result, we manage more software with a growing number of interactions – a single scan of an item during checkout could mean touching a distributed tree of dozens of services, with hundreds of thousands of these done per minute.
  • Graph showing a process beginning with a complicated schema that is fed through GraphQL, followed by an ideation phase with clients, feeding into a query repo, then through an API engine, ending with the visual representation of serving three APIs to three unique client apps.

    The Journey of Building a Self-Service Platform for Aggregated APIs

    By Tom Rauk, May 13, 2022
    The digital catalog team at Target is responsible for a collection of nearly 100 aggregated APIs to provide browse data for Target.com and mobile app platforms. In early 2019, we were just coming off a large backend migration which meant we would need to version a lot of these APIs. This was a huge effort for all teams involved in standing up and moving to new API versions. With the volume of APIs that needed testing, we needed a solution that would scale and allow our teams to move more quickly.
  • Black and red copy on white background with Target bullseye logo announcing Target tech's Product Engineering Conference on May 19

    Product Engineering @ Target: Engaging With Our ‘Why'

    By Nancy King, May 2, 2022
    Our product engineering organization builds a large proportion of the applications that our millions of guests and 350,000+ team members use, from the mobile app and website to our point-of-sale software, to the HQ systems supporting our operations. These are the technologies that help bring Target’s purpose to life and grow our business online and across nearly 2,000 stores nationwide. The key to success is really knowing and supporting our users across the country.
  • List of file names that get increasingly more complex, HighLevelOverview_Final, HighLevelOverview_FINALFINAL, etc.

    Requirements for Creating a Documentation Workflow Loved by Both Data Scientists and Engineers

    By Colin Dean, April 6, 2022
    This is an adaptation of a presentation delivered to conferences including Write the Docs Portland 2020, Ohio Linuxfest OpenLibreFree 2020, and FOSDEM 2021. The presentation source is available at GitHub and recordings are available on YouTube. This is a two-part post that will share both the requirements and execution of the documentation workflow we built that is now used by many of our teammates and leaders. Read part two here.
  • word cloud with large words reading "pandoc" "mactex" "crossref" and smaller words around reading things like "make" and "docker" and "citeproc" among others

    Executing a Documentation Workflow

    By Colin Dean, April 6, 2022
    This post is the second in a two-part series about creating a documentation workflow for data scientists and engineers. Click here to read the first post. This is an adaptation of a presentation delivered to conferences including Write the Docs Portland 2020, Ohio Linuxfest OpenLibreFree 2020, and FOSDEM 2021. The presentation source is available at GitHub and recordings are available on YouTube.
  • This image shows a line graph with the y axis of "latency" metrics from 0-400 measured in milliseconds, and a x axis showing "model type" with five BERT models listed. The graph shows a green upward trend line from 25 to 350 ms.

    Using BERT Model to Generate Real-time Embeddings

    By Pushkar Chennu and Amit Pande, March 23, 2022
    How we chose and implemented an effective model to generate embeddings in real-time. Target has been exploring, leveraging, and releasing open source software for several years now, and we are seeing positive impact to how we work together already. In early 2021, our recommendations team started to consider real-time natural language input from guests, such as search queries, Instagram posts, and product reviews, because these signals can be useful for personalized product recommendations. We planned to generate representations of those guest inputs using the open source Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model.
  • three side-by-side images of mobile phones against red backgrounds, the first one says "see upcoming shifts" and shows that functionality on the phone screen below, the middle image "view your weekly schedule," and the third image reads "check for available shifts"

    myTime for Target: Built for Target by Target

    By Dana Klein and Scott Adcock, March 17, 2022
    Target has spent the last several years modernizing our technology stack and advancing our in-house development capabilities. We’ve grown to a global team of over 4,500 incredibly talented technologists and created a culture of testing, learning, and agile processes to great success. This journey has led to an uptick in fantastic new homegrown innovations that help make Target a joyful place to shop and work.
  • Target SVP pictured in front of bookshelves, wearing a down vest and glasses on the left side, next to a screenshot of a Powerpoint slide reading "Target's Infrastructure Journey"

    The Journey to a Hybrid-Multi-Cloud

    By Hari Govind, February 17, 2022
    Target's cloud journey started about a decade ago. First there was Amazon Web Services (AWS). Followed by IBM Cloud. Then Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We have since expanded to a Hybrid-Multi-Cloud architecture with GCP and Microsoft Azure.
  • screenshot of code snippet describing a payload wallet rule with Eric Brandel listed as author

    Behind the Scenes of Merry Maker

    By Eric Brandel and Caleb Walch, February 1, 2022
    We recently introduced Target’s cybersecurity tool “Merry Maker” and open sourced the framework to help others protect against digital skimming.
  • Target store team member pictured wearing a Santa hat with holiday decor shelves behind him. The team member is showing something on a device to a young girl with a light purple coat on, and she looks surprised and happy

    Meet Merry Maker: How Target Protects Against Digital Skimming

    By Chris Carlson, February 1, 2022
    Credit card skimmers are custom-made additions to payment devices (like ATMs or gas pumps) that criminals build and use to steal a consumer’s payment information.
  • graph called "PR merge time" with time on the y-axis, and dates on the x-axis. the graph is on a black background with bars in green, yellow, orange, and red showing a breakdown of merge time per day from April 15-September 27

    Review Scrutiny

    By Brian Muenzenmeyer, January 11, 2022
    Our team within Engineering Enablement serves our engineers so they can build the technology products that are used every day by our guests, team members, and partners.
  • screen capture from a Zoom call showing 36 small screens with one Target engineer in each box. The first three engineers in the top left of the image have "Congrats" in big letters behind them.

    Redefining Traditional Pathways to Engineering Careers at Target

    By Alicia Henderson, November 12, 2021
    This past July, Target tech celebrated the first 24 team members to complete our Emerging Engineers Program.
  • diagram showing the application of patterns on legacy applications. Steps are listed numerically as follows: 1. initial data load, 2. cutover to new modern UI; turn off old, 3. Shim back changes to legacy data source, 4. Enable new data source interfaces, 5. Onboard consumers to modern data sources, 6. Decommission when all legacy consumers are gone

    Modernizing Data Sources Using Shims

    By Janine Mechelke, October 26, 2021
    At Target we’re always evolving our business to meet the needs of our guests and team members — which means we’re also always evolving how we build technology.
  • Diagram of a Vulnerable Container scenario with the following text included: "For this scenario, an attacker sees a node that is vulnerable that they then leverage which gives them access to a container for further actions. The root cause could be the code in the repository has a vulnerability." Below this text is a diagram of a web application firewall. Below this is a thick blue line under which is written: "Analysis and Containment. The largest hurdle around containment is the timing it takes for everything to come together; for this scenario the items detailed below would all have to come together in order to achieve containment of what is known. Analysis and containment actions: A. Isolation of the impacted container(s), begin analysis of attacker actions to then take containment and remediation steps. This part is very important as you want to reduce further impact, know what happened, and what to address next. B. Identify attacker behavior, C. Deploy alerting and/or blocking mechanisms for identified attacker, D. Review of the code for the vulnerabilities, to then fix, E. Deploy fixed containers, F. Remediation of removal of remaining vulnerable container(s) without causing business impact.

    Container Analysis and Containment

    By Kyle Shattuck, October 19, 2021
    When containers become unhealthy in production environments, a nuclear action is often the best option. When it comes to a security alert however, a different approach is needed.
  • image of four Target engineers seated at a table working on their four individual laptops

    50 Days of Learning: One Week as an Engineer

    By Adam Westman, August 9, 2019
    How embedding as a software engineer results in learning and empathy.
  • GoAlert logo with a red thought bubble containing small red dog wagging its tail next to the words "GoAlert"

    GoAlert - Now Available in Open Source

    By Adam Westman, June 11, 2019
    Open Source GoAlert Is Now Available At https://github.com/target/goalert
  • screenshot showing a screen of code representing "Execute Kafka-DB test" that was run 14 minutes ago and lasted for 2 minutes, 56 seconds. the code on the screen shows the initialization of the process and successful test process completing

    Using Drone for Automated Integration Testing

    By Pam Vermeer and Pat Moberg, May 20, 2019
    Our team developed a service that reads from a Kafka topic, interacts with a Postgres database using basic CRUD operations, and calls APIs on an external service.
  • outline of the word 'chaos' filled in with a maze-like design, with the word 'engineering' in block letters underneath

    Ɔhaos Ǝnginǝǝring @ Target - Part 2

    By Brian Lee and Jason Doffing, May 9, 2019
    What is a Game Day?
  • four Target engineers pictured in discussion sitting around an office conference room table, with laptops open

    Target Finds Cross-Site Scripting in Microsoft SharePoint

    By Sydney Delp, Jamie Feist, and Steven Kaun, March 15, 2019
    During a recent penetration test, Target's Security Testing Services team found that Microsoft's SharePoint was vulnerable to a unique attack that, unlike typical cross-site scripting, could be exploited without any interaction from the victim user.
  • Target Measuremint logo - a smiley cartoon red and white peppermint wearing Target red and khaki, holding a ruler and measuring tool

    GoAlert - Your Future Open Source, On-Call Notification Product

    By Adam Westman, February 25, 2019
    A few years ago, Target started a journey to move into a product-based organization with dedicated, durable, full-stack teams.
  • outline of the word 'chaos' filled in with a maze-like design, with the word 'engineering' in block letters underneath

    Ɔhaos Ǝnginǝǝring @ Target - Part 1

    By Brian Lee, Jason Doffing, and Sean Peters, February 5, 2019
    Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.
  • a view of a Target engineer dressed in a black sweater with red zig zag patterns looking at his screen with lines of code on it, in front of a window looking out on a city block of brick buildings

    Spring Boot Service-to-Service Communication

    By Jeffrey Bursik and Pruthvi Dintakurthi, December 18, 2018
    This post will walk through our implementation of Spring Feign Client, our learnings, and how Spring Feign Client has helped manage our inner-service communication while reducing the amount of development time.
  • light gray map of the United States with over 1800 small red dots indicating Target store locations

    Running Cassandra in Kubernetes Across 1,800 Stores

    By Daniel Parker and Mike Showalter, August 8, 2018
    Stateful Apps in a Stateless World
  • Meet Target’s Stores Deployment Interface that Realizes Distributed Edge Computing at Retail Scale

    By Dan Woods, June 20, 2018
    At the beginning of 2017... ... our engineering team embarked on a journey to facilitate rapid software delivery to Target stores to better enable innovation and more quickly respond to ever-evolving business needs.
  • Leveraging Log Streaming to Build the Best Dashboards, Ever

    By Eddie Roger, April 30, 2018
    This blog post is a follow-up to a presentation given at Fastly's Altitude NYC conference on April 17, 2018.