Just wrapped up my senior SWE loop at Target and I know the system design round is the part people ask about most, so here goes.
First thing: Target calls their senior IC level something like "Senior Engineer" (not L5 by their internal title but the market comp maps roughly to L5 at other companies). When recruiters say senior, expect a 60-minute system design session that is pretty product-systems heavy, not the pure distributed-systems marathon you'd get at Google or Stripe.
The prompt I got was something in the space of: design the inventory management system for a retailer handling Black Friday scale. Very on-brand. They cared about: how you handle read-heavy vs write-heavy traffic differently data consistency trade-offs when inventory is shared across physical stores and dot-com how caching interacts with flash sales (the cache invalidation rabbit hole came up immediately) event-driven architecture for stock updates (Kafka came up naturally in my answer and the interviewer leaned in)
They were NOT trying to gotcha me with obscure database internals. The bar felt more like: can you reason through a real retail problem, communicate trade-offs clearly, and not freeze when they poke holes in your design. The interviewer asked "what breaks first if order volume 10x's overnight" and that turned into a solid 20-minute back-and-forth.
One thing I did not expect: they asked me to walk through how I'd roll the change out safely. Deployment strategy, feature flags, rollback. Not many companies fold that into system design but Target did. Probably because they actually run huge retail deployments and care about it.
Prep that helped me: thinking through retail-specific problems (stock sync, cart abandonment, fulfillment routing) rather than generic FAANG prep. Also worth knowing that Target has a big in-house tech presence in Minneapolis and they take the distributed systems piece seriously even if the pace is a bit less intense than pure big tech.
Happy to answer questions below.