Principal AI Engineer

We help the world run better
At SAP, we keep it simple: you bring your best to us, and we'll bring out the best in you. We're builders touching over 20 industries and 80% of global commerce, and we need your unique talents to help shape what's next. The work is challenging – but it matters. You'll find a place where you can be yourself, prioritize your wellbeing, and truly belong. What's in it for you? Constant learning, skill growth, great benefits, and a team that wants you to grow and succeed. 

What you`ll do 

Summary:

We are looking for a Principal AI Engineer / AI Architect who can drive enterprise-grade AgenticAI development and lead our engineering scrum teams as technical artifact owner overseeing multiple development streams as well as foundational agenticAI solution- and software architecture decisions. The candidate will have proven and industry-leading skills in Data Science and Data Engineering as well as Software Engineering and Solution Architecture, with an entrepreneurial spirit to join our diverse team and work on innovation projects as well as exceptional leadership and people skills.

Role:

In this role you drive, oversee and are responsible for the entire development lifecycle of multiple (agentic) AI services, from Data Science PoC to productization and production operations.

You own and evolve best practices to impact the AI software quality of many teams which requires you to be able to quickly abstract and evolve concepts around AI software productization that play a pivot role across multiple development scrum teams. This also requires people leadership on a technical level and the ability to properly explain highly complex AI best practices to a team of practitioners and developers such that they can apply them.

You are very experienced with general software engineering best practices and enterprise-grade code development applied to an AI space. Concretely this means that next to having profound AI modeling expertise, you are exceptional at working with vast amounts of data in a Big Data setup, professional Data Engineering Pipeline development as well as model deployment/serving and CI/CD setup. To fully understand our stakeholders' problems and challenges a solid business acumen is needed as well. As a development leader you can motivate and guide a scrum team through complex tasks with tight deadlines.

Responsibilities / Core Tasks:

• Lead develop AI services from PoC to Production
• Lead the development of a best practice framework for AI development (both narrow and GenAI) for all dev streams and teams
• Lead the definition, evolution and drive the setup of infrastructure architecture for the AI applications we are building
• Setup and develop new Big Data pipelines, to productize data ETL workloads for different AI services.
• Develop AI/ML models to solve real life business problems (this includes Data Science exploration phase as well as model productization)
• Work with stakeholders throughout the organization to identify opportunities for leveraging company data to drive business solutions.
• Productionize AI PoCs with good software engineering by incorporating CI/CD pipelines, deployment and MLOps.
• Take ownership over AI services in development and production
• Lead, guide and mentor junior colleagues and evolve their AI engineering skillset

What you bring

• Bachelor's or master's degree in machine learning, computer science, engineering, or related technical field
• Vast coding knowledge of at least one programming language such as Python or Java
• Deep knowledge of Distributed Computing Systems for Big Data Engineering such as Databricks (PySpark/Scala)
• Exceptional understanding of AI/ML concepts
• Good understanding and hands on experience in agentic AI communication technologies such as MCP and A2A
• Exceptional understanding of AIOps and LLMOps/AgentOps concepts (e.g. MLflow 3.0)
• Deep Infrastructure knowledge around AI solution design on Hyperscalar clouds such as Azure/AWS/GCP
• Extensive coding experience in applying ML frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Langchain, OpenAI, Huggingface, Crew
• Very deep experience in applying AgenticAI frameworks such as Langgraph, CrewAI, Microsoft agent framework or google-adk
• Industry leading general software engineering best-practices (e.g. Object-Oriented Programming) and experience working in a scrum-like software engineering unit.
• Productization technologies and tools such as Docker, K8s, GitHub, VSCode, Linux etc.
• CI/CD and ML Ops frameworks such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, MLFlow, etc.
• Cloud-deployment offerings such as Azure ML, Databricks, AKS, Event Hubs, Azure Data Factory, Azure Functions or similar in AWS / GCP
• Some form of code ownership and scrum team leadership experience
• Curiosity to learn about different AI applications and new technologies in general
• Excellent spoken and written knowledge of English as well as collaborative mindset; good German language skills
• Experience with SAP AI offerings e.g. AI Core, AI Business Services, Joule etc. is a plus
• Understanding of Agile / Scaled Agile (SAFe) methodologies is a plus
• Python backend development, e.g. Flask, Django, FastAPI, Quart

Meet your team

Within SAP IT, our Enterprise AI CoE team has the purpose to help SAP to transform into a data-driven intelligent enterprise, by empowering SAP employees to simplify processes, leveraging AI technologies. Our vision is to be an advocate and enabler of best-in-class AI within SAP. Our mission is to deliver business value through AI in SAP's processes and be recognized as AI Thought Leader in the market.

We implement both standard SAP AI and custom built solutions across all LoBs. We are customer zero of SAP standard AI solutions and provide continuous feedback to standard development for product improvement. We provide an AI Platform and Infrastructure to entire SAP AI practitioners for building their own ML solutions in the entire ML lifecycle following MLOps methodology. Furthermore, we build and operate a central chatbot platform based on SAP Conversational AI with the aim to provide capabilities from all lines of business through a single digital assistant. We also build those capabilities (individual chatbots) as well as support other teams in building further ones.

Within our team, we practice a trust-based working model with emphasis on great collaboration, agility and transparency. We offer a lot of room for creativity and freedom to experiment. Our operating model is based on autonomous/agile team concept (SAFe) and SAP New Work practice where we put people at the center of everything we do.

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Bring out your best
SAP innovations help more than four hundred thousand customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. Originally known for leadership in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP has evolved to become a market leader in end-to-end business application software and related services for database, analytics, intelligent technologies, and experience management. As a cloud company with two hundred million users and more than one hundred thousand employees worldwide, we are purpose-driven and future-focused, with a highly collaborative team ethic and commitment to personal development. Whether connecting global industries, people, or platforms, we help ensure every challenge gets the solution it deserves. At SAP, you can bring out your best.  

We win with inclusion
SAP's culture of inclusion, focus on health and well-being, and flexible working models help ensure that everyone – regardless of background – feels included and can run at their best. At SAP, we believe we are made stronger by the unique capabilities and qualities that each person brings to our company, and we invest in our employees to inspire confidence and help everyone realize their full potential. We ultimately believe in unleashing all talent and creating a better world.

SAP is committed to the values of Equal Employment Opportunity and provides accessibility accommodations to applicants with physical and/or mental disabilities. If you are interested in applying for employment with SAP and are in need of accommodation or special assistance to navigate our website or to complete your application, please send an e-mail with your request to Recruiting Operations Team:

For SAP employees: Only permanent roles are eligible for the SAP Employee Referral Program, according to the eligibility rules set in the SAP Referral Policy. Specific conditions may apply for roles in Vocational Training.

AI Usage in the Recruitment Process

For information on the responsible use of AI in our recruitment process, please refer to our Guidelines for Ethical Usage of AI in the Recruiting Process.

Please note that any violation of these guidelines may result in disqualification from the hiring process.

Requisition ID: | Work Area: Information Technology  | Expected Travel: 0 - 10%  | Career Status: Professional  | Employment Type: Part Time or Regular Full Time   | #LI-Hybrid

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