Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Relevant Projects
Timeline
Generic

Vanessa Esaw

Minneapolis,MN

Overview

9
9
years of professional experience

Work History

Software Engineer in Item Performance Team

Target
08.2020 - 01.2025
  • Assisted in the development of LLM application that leverages Internal Search, External Search, and Competitor Search data to create ranked prompts for generating optimized product titles, improving Target's online visibility, resulting in an 11% increase in search visibility for Home items and a projected $20-25M in sales for Target.com.
  • Engineered and optimized data pipelines for Target’s Performance Engine, migrating millions of rows of data, enabling $15.5M in incremental demand sales.
  • Led development Facet Relevancy and Attribute Contribution Index (ACI) data pipelines, contributing to $15M in sales growth in 2021.
  • Enhanced Facet Feasibility and ACI pipelines, leading to $8-9M in additional sales in 2022.
  • Improved the Performance Engine ML model through feature engineering (OHE), boosting accuracy and efficiency, contributing to $11.5M in profit in 2022.
  • Developed financial-entitlement data pipelines, providing crucial insights for Performance Engine optimization.
  • Created automation solutions that reduced job failures and improved pipeline efficiency by 60%, mitigating system overload issues.
  • Created complex queries for key e-commerce metrics (add-to-cart, CTR, facet feasibility) to enhance product visibility.
  • Provided key queries and data insights to Data Scientists conducting sensitivity analysis on ML models, implemented neural network, and integrated hypothesis generator model script to the Performance Engine UI.
  • Presented machine learning contributions with team at Target’s Demo Day 2022, increasing project visibility at the executive level.
  • Provided critical engineering support throughout time on team, first as one of two engineers and at times as the sole engineer, ensuring business continuity and sustained team contributions despite staffing challenges.

Software Engineer Technology Leadership Program

Target
07.2019 - 02.2020
  • Developed and optimized a chatbot system to enhance automation within the Intelligent Digital Robotics team.
  • Refactored bot logic to efficiently locate work items within Target’s tariff-processing platform, improving execution speed by 10x.
  • Redesigned bot architecture to seamlessly integrate with new departments and allow easy expansion for future enhancements.
  • Created detailed troubleshooting documentation and led knowledge transfer sessions, ensuring a smooth transition for new engineers after transition to new team

Software Engineer Intern

Thomson Reuters
06.2018 - 07.2018
  • Developed ETL SQL & Python scripts to optimize AI-powered recommendation systems, improving ranking algorithms

Research Assistant

Stockholm University
05.2016 - 07.2016
  • Applied Machine Learning (AdaBoost Decision Trees) to process terabytes of daily data from the IceCube neutrino telescope, detecting whether signals represented neutrinos or other cosmic particles.
  • Performed A/B testing and hyperparameter tuning to improve classification performance.

Education

Bachelors Degree -

Metropolitan State University
05.2019

Skills

  • Spring Boot
  • Kotlin/ Vanilla Kotlin
  • Kotest Framework
  • Scala
  • C/C
  • Java
  • MYSQL
  • Postgres
  • MongoDB
  • Python
  • Groovy
  • Jenkins

Relevant Projects

Coupon Machine Learning Project (in progress)

  • Developing tool to recommend coupons based on user’s preference, using python
  • Constructed automated bot that scrapes various coupon websites for coupon data via Selenium
  • Compiled over 500k rows of data from various coupon websites via automated bot
  • Currently enriching raw coupon data via feature engineering

Timeline

Software Engineer in Item Performance Team

Target
08.2020 - 01.2025

Software Engineer Technology Leadership Program

Target
07.2019 - 02.2020

Software Engineer Intern

Thomson Reuters
06.2018 - 07.2018

Research Assistant

Stockholm University
05.2016 - 07.2016

Bachelors Degree -

Metropolitan State University

Similar Profiles

CREATE PROFILE
Vanessa Esaw