We are Target tech
Technologists committed to making Target America's easiest, safest, and most joyful place to shop and work
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Synthetics: Continuous Assurance of Detection ComponentsBy Paul Hutelmyer, December 13, 2022This 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 AvailabilityBy Shesadri Parthasarathy, December 1, 2022A 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 Kids: Spotlight on STEMBy Beth Miller and Rebecca Roeder, August 17, 2022Target 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 WorldBy Michael 'Miggs' Migliacio, August 8, 2022Ryse 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 ExtensionsBy Arman Shah, August 2, 2022Target’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, 2022When 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 ToleranceBy John Engelman, June 22, 2022In 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 EcosystemBy Tyghe Vallard, June 9, 2022Across 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 APIsBy Tom Rauk, May 13, 2022The 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, 2022Our 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 EngineersBy Colin Dean, April 6, 2022This 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 WorkflowBy Colin Dean, April 6, 2022This 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 EmbeddingsBy Pushkar Chennu and Amit Pande, March 23, 2022How 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 TargetBy Dana Klein and Scott Adcock, March 17, 2022Target 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-CloudBy Hari Govind, February 17, 2022Target'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.
- Target Finds Cross-Site Scripting in Microsoft SharePointBy Sydney Delp, Jamie Feist, and Steven Kaun, March 15, 2019During 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.
- Spring Boot Service-to-Service CommunicationBy Jeffrey Bursik and Pruthvi Dintakurthi, December 18, 2018This 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.
- Meet Target’s Stores Deployment Interface that Realizes Distributed Edge Computing at Retail ScaleBy Dan Woods, June 20, 2018At 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.
