Marc Kapke

Marc Kapke: Backend & AI

Senior Principal Engineer at Shipt, based in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.

I build the platforms that let a company become AI native: shared agentic infrastructure with evaluation and observability built in, conversational shopping on Shipt and inside ChatGPT and Claude, and tooling that lets engineers, PMs and designers build with the same context and guardrails.

What I’m building now

AI-native builder platform

Created Shipt’s AI-native builder platform on an open-source agent runtime. Adoption more than doubled in two months without a mandate, spreading from engineering to product and design. Compression and cost-aware model routing cut tool-output tokens by ~83%.

Shared agentic stack

Architected the platform every agent builds on: self-hosted tracing, offline and online evaluation, LLM gateway routing, and a common way for agents to render rich UI on Shipt and inside AI assistants. Eval gates protect every customer-facing and internal agent.

Agentic commerce

Set the technical direction for a multi-agent shopping assistant, live for all guests, that builds larger-than-average baskets from intent, and for a Shipt app inside ChatGPT and Claude where one in three shopping sessions hands off to checkout.

Experience

  1. 2026Jan 2026 – present

    Senior Principal Engineer, Backend & AI

    Shipt, Minneapolis

    • Returned to the technical track from Director to lead through architecture, platforms and hands-on building.
    • Created Shipt’s AI-native builder platform on an open-source agent runtime. Adoption more than doubled in two months without a mandate, spreading from engineering to product and design.
    • Architected the shared agentic stack every agent builds on: self-hosted tracing, offline and online evaluation, LLM gateway routing, and eval gates on every customer-facing and internal agent.
    • Set the technical direction for agentic commerce: a multi-agent shopping assistant live for all guests, and a Shipt app inside ChatGPT and Claude where one in three shopping sessions hands off to checkout.

  2. 2024Jan 2024 – Jan 2026

    Director of Engineering, Marketplace

    Shipt, Minneapolis

    • Led the engineering organization behind Shipt’s promotions, personalization and marketplace experiences, running quarterly all-hands for 80+ people across engineering, product, UX, research and data science.
    • Built the incentive platform that let the business accelerate promotions on demand, adding promotion types with automated incrementality measurement and retiring the legacy campaign system.
    • Modernized personalization with embedding-based (two-tower) recommendation models and architected the first phase of an enterprise pricing engine with low-code order-level pricing.
    • Expanded Target–Shipt connected experiences, including a Target order-confirmation entry point that became Shipt’s top source of traffic, and a first-order promotion that improved redemption 10x.
    • Grew engineering leaders, mentoring and promoting two engineering managers to Senior Engineering Manager.

  3. 2020Aug 2020 – Jan 2024

    Senior Principal Engineer, Marketing

    Shipt, Minneapolis

    • Architected and led multiple teams building a customer incentive platform for dynamic, personalized and targeted content, plus tooling for business teams to fund, create and measure it.
    • Replaced the technology foundation of a set of interwoven, always-on marketing systems with no downtime, and introduced an audience capability that made audience assignment 100x faster.
    • With data science, built an event-driven reinforcement-learning engine using contextual multi-armed bandits, reaching statistical significance in hours instead of weeks of A/B testing.
    • Created a multi-year marketing platform vision and roadmap, and rebooted the marketing technology organization by hiring across product, engineering and data science.

  4. 2015Aug 2015 – Aug 2020

    Principal Engineer, Digital

    Target, Minneapolis

    • Built a high-scale product aggregation tier for mobile and web clients, helping lead Target from a monolith to microservices through 50x+ growth in digital traffic.
    • After Target acquired Shipt, led a cross-company team to build a retail integration platform that brought same-day delivery to Target.com, with Target as Shipt’s first integrated retailer.
    • Re-platformed Target’s CMS on React, GraphQL and Spring Boot microservices: internal tooling for 500+ users, product taxonomy and real-time content serving for all digital clients.

  5. 2014Sep 2014 – Aug 2015

    Owner

    Kapke Software LLC, St. Paul

    • Ran an independent software consultancy, partnering with clients including GED Testing Service and Berkley Risk.
    • Delivered technology roadmaps, engineering best practices and key functionality as scalable, maintainable solutions.

  6. 2008Sep 2008 – Sep 2014

    Software Development Engineer, HTML Client Tools

    Microsoft, Visual Studio and Expression, St. Paul

    • Built tooling into Visual Studio with C#, WPF and JavaScript that let developers build and deploy Cordova apps for Android, iOS and Windows.
    • Owned feature and product quality for Expression Web, an HTML authoring application, and SuperPreview, a cloud-based cross-browser diagnostics tool.
    • Built an agile scrum board application for the team that was later adopted across the larger organization.

Earlier career

Education