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

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New Target Chief Information Officer Brett Craig, pictured seated against a blurred office background

Talking Shop with Brett Craig, Target's New Chief Information Officer

Hear from Brett on how his background and career prepared him for his new role. He also shares his perspective on how technology and data will continue to influence the Target shopping experience under his leadership, and his thoughts on how technology connects to and shapes the future of retail.

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Target Chief Information Security Officer Rich Agostino in a blue suit jacket and white dress shirt, photographed with bright windows in the background

Target CISO Rich Agostino on leading customers to security

Rich Agostino recently sat down with his long time thought partner Keith Ferrazzi to discuss how the CISO role can be a source of competitive advantage for companies. Rich shared his thoughts on how cybersecurity not only protects retail consumers from cybercriminals, but also elevates the customer experience.

Read the interview
Target drive up sign with parking lot against a background of blue sky with scattered clouds

Target’s SVP of product engineering Nancy King featured in ZDNet

The Target tech team rose to the challenges of the pandemic through a combination of years of tech investments, tight collaboration with business teams, and relentless focus on our guests. Hear from SVP Nancy King on how our culture of support bolstered the team to not only survive but thrive in such challenging times.

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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.

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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Real-Time Personalization Using Microservices

    By Amit Pande, Prathyusha Kanmanth Reddy, and Pushkar Chennu, May 11, 2023
    How Target's Personalization team uses microservices to improve our guest experience
  • 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.
  • "Friday Five" - Featuring Dat Dang, Lead Cybersecurity Analyst

    By Tech @ Target, March 3, 2023
    Profile of Target Lead Cybersecurity Analyst Dat Dang
  • CI/CD Pipeline Incident Response

    By Kyle Shattuck and Brandon Ingalls, February 16, 2023
    An actionable incident response playbook for your CI/CD pipeline.
  • “Friday Five” Featuring Kaylee Edwards, Senior Engineer – Agile and Engineering Enablement

    By Tech @ Target, January 13, 2023
    Profile of Target Senior Engineer Kaylee Edwards
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • Chaos Leads to Resilience

    By Deepa Kn, November 10, 2022
    How Target uses chaos experiments to test the resilience of our architecture.
  • 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’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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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!
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 👍 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 - Now Available in Open Source

    By Adam Westman, June 11, 2019
    Open Source GoAlert Is Now Available At https://github.com/target/goalert
  • 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.
  • Ɔhaos Ǝnginǝǝring @ Target - Part 2

    By Brian Lee and Jason Doffing, May 9, 2019
    What is a Game Day?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.