Lakshmi Priya Gopalsamy

Journalist-style Fellow statement for Lakshmi Priya Gopalsamy

Lakshmi Priya Gopalsamy is an enterprise engineering leader who has built a career around a hard constraint that defines modern retail and financial platforms: systems must stay correct and available when customer demand peaks, failures cascade, and business risk is highest. Now a Senior Engineering Manager at Target Corporation, she operates at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and operational resilience—leading teams that deliver measurable business outcomes while strengthening platform reliability, security posture, and incident response maturity.

In her current role (since August 2025) leading Finance Payment & Services at Target, Gopalsamy directs cross-functional engineering teams responsible for high-volume, enterprise-grade transaction platforms. She leads the Corporate Bulk Ordering System (CBOS) end-to-end—from customer onboarding through fulfillment—where digital gift card capabilities are projected to generate ~$12M in incremental annual revenue. In parallel, she drives real-time bank authorization and decisioning rules engines for Target Debit Card approvals across online and in-store channels, building fault-tolerant services engineered for low latency, high availability, and strict correctness—capabilities that directly strengthen Target’s proprietary payments ecosystem.

Her platform leadership depth is further established through her tenure leading Target’s Data Engineering Platform (Dec 2023–Jul 2025). As Peak Captain, she coordinated readiness efforts to protect stability during the company’s highest-traffic retail events—where reliability translates immediately to revenue protection and customer trust. She architected platform simplification through a Unified Compute Gateway, and drove a re-architecture of Argus to support 120,000+ Spark jobs per day, a scale that demands disciplined control of throughput, dependencies, and operational governance. She also led Data Storage and Asset Lifecycle Management initiatives, addressing $3.1M in projected infrastructure costs while improving Target’s platform PI security score by 50%—a tangible combination of cost governance and security hardening. Her teams also delivered a generative AI-powered support bot (via ThinkTank APIs) to automate issue resolution for 7,000+ internal users, demonstrating a pragmatic, operations-first approach to intelligent automation.

Before that, she led Production Engineering at Target in two successive leadership arcs (Jun 2020–Dec 2023), building foundational reliability infrastructure and incident management systems. She led the creation of Rally, a centralized high-severity incident response platform integrated with Zoom, Slack, and ServiceNow, and delivered Change Console for governed production changes via Kafka Streams. She also drove the Linked Intelligence System (LIS)—a relationship catalog across Target’s digital assets—alongside Lighthouse UI, status tooling, and SLO-based availability measurement. By constructing pipelines using Kafka and REST APIs, persisting operational records in Elasticsearch, and analyzing dependencies in a graph database, she enabled operational intelligence that strengthens mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-recover across enterprise systems.

Her earlier career shows consistent progression through enterprise modernization programs across major organizations. At Best Buy (2018–2020), she built the Product Data Management engineering organization from the ground up and led platform replacement that reduced product onboarding time by 60%+ using REST APIs and Kafka Streams. At Wells Fargo (2016–2017), she led critical projects during the GE–Wells Fargo migration, delivering user account management systems under complex integration constraints. At Comcast (2015–2016), she shipped operational APIs for technician workflows, established CI via Jenkins, and implemented enterprise SSO with Spring SAML. At Truven Health Analytics/Virtusa (2013–2015), she engineered clinical data acquisition capabilities—including HL7-to-JSON transformations—supporting nationwide patient data analytics and insurance workflows. Earlier roles at HCL/Cisco and Indorion Networks established her engineering base in Java, Spring, REST, and enterprise operations.

Recognition and influence have accompanied her delivery record. She was selected to present platform modernization work at Target’s Q1 and Q2 2025 Demo Days. In October 2020, she authored a whitepaper recommending ONgDB adoption that received Architecture Board approval, shaping Target’s enterprise graph database direction. Her Rally platform became enterprise-wide infrastructure adopted by Target Operations Center Services—an uncommon signal of platform legitimacy: when operations adopts it, it becomes real.

Beyond delivery, Gopalsamy has invested heavily in talent development and community-building. She has served as a judge for the Minnesota Technology Association ACE Leadership Program and Target Women in Science & Technology EPIC Awards (since 2025), mentors small IT firms through Target’s Tech Equity Mentorship Program (since Sept 2025), and serves as a Board Member for Target’s Tech Equity ProBono Program (since June 2021). She founded Target’s Production Engineering New Tech Talent Mentorship Program in 2022 and secured VP-level sponsorship—turning mentorship into a durable institutional program. She also led Target Tech Kids STEM volunteer activities, translating enterprise engineering into community learning experiences.