Architecture

Our Architecture teams help create and drive Target’s technical vision and culture of enterprise agility. We lead the industry with an enterprise platform that powers all the technology needs of retail, IT, corporate and data sciences. We focus on an architecture that is flexible, scalable, and composable while providing best-in-class tools and technologies, so Target engineers have an intuitive frictionless experience and can plan for the unknown. Our Tech Capabilities team facilitates continuous learning and development, strong and efficient operational routines, and fosters enterprise agility across Target to meet the ever-changing needs of our team members and guests.

Recent blogs

  • 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

    January 13, 2023
    By Tech @ Target
    Profile of Target Senior Engineer Kaylee Edwards
  • 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 🕹

    July 28, 2022
    By Jay Kline
    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

    June 22, 2022
    By John Engelman
    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.
  • 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

    January 11, 2022
    By Brian Muenzenmeyer
    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.
  • 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

    October 26, 2021
    By Janine Mechelke
    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.